Clemenceau Explains

Few honors are greater, more feverishly sought than the privilege of sitting as a member of the French Academy. Yet M. Georges Eugene Adrien Clemenceau, although elected to the Academy in 1918, has never taken his seat. Why? He explained testily to a correspondent last week at Paris:

"My reasons for not presenting myself to the Academy? They concern me alone. Look here. Here are my books, my Demosthenes, my garden. I have lived my life and I can confide to you what now is my one principle: one must never tell what one feels, knows or sees. That is why I am not going to talk under the cupola of the Academy. That is why I shall continue to commune with myself in silence. In my day the journalists did the talking for the public. These days the public talks for the journalists."