FRANCE: Mystical Ambassador

The few Berliners who have dabbled seriously in modern French literature welcomed with a pleasure tempered by surprise the appointment of M. Paul Claudel as French Ambassador to Germany.

Is not M. Claudel chiefly famed as a poet of passionate Roman Catholic inspiration, a genius whose poems and dramas are often inspired, and at least equally often violent, rhetorical, extravagant and wilfully obscure? How, asked practical-minded Germans, can the French have been so mad as to send as their Ambassador this poet, moody, mystical, perverse? . . .

German diplomats who had never...

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