One and three-quarters centuries make a long time. Few U. S. communities are so old. In one tenth that time, many a U. S. community has changed entirely—the German and Swedish farmers of a Wisconsin county into jitney-riding city stenographers and factory hands; the Italian truck-gardeners of an Ohio township into the proprietors of a bootlegging "Little Italy." Americanization crusades and Progress have made racial slag, temporarily, of much that was pure foreign metal in the North. In the South and Far West, what remains of the Spanish scarcely suffices to fill the realty booklets.
Last week, however, there was enacted an idyl which served to remind U. S. citizens that their country has not so inaccurately been called a New United Europe. In Louisiana, near the Mississippi's mouth, there remains a section still racially pure and traditionally almost a country within a country, the Bayou Teche country of the French who fled from Grand Pré, Canada, in 1755. They are les Acadiens. Last week, like other distinguished Frenchmen before him, Ambassador Paul Claudel went there. "Vous êtes ici parmi les Français," a serious local dignitary told him. "Nos ancêstres sont fraçais, nos sentiments sont fraçais, notre religion est fraçais." It was so surprisingly true that the good Ambassador felt himself deeply touched by it all.
It was full springtime in the South and Ambassador Claudel is a poet famed and, in the French sense, serious. It was full springtime and the poet-ambassador was finding travel restful after a winter of buzzy Washington. He had seen Florida. He was going next to Tennessee. In between came this spot of which he had heard so much and he was prepared to luxuriate in it.
With him traveled his more-than-pretty daughter, Mlle. Marie Antoinette Claudel,* blonde, blue-eyed, ready to pass from jeune fille to grande dame. Doubtless she would find New Orleans, where gallantry is understood, more enchanting than Washington, where flattery keeps its net mended to capture the mayflies of gossip so important to political life. She would share with him the warm friendliness of a sort of homecoming, but in not quite the same blissful passivity as he, Paul Claudel, poet.
At New Orleans, there was a State reception, with the very corpulent Mayor O'Keefe and other officials standing by. There were bouquets, compliments and invitations for Mademoiselle. For M. 1'Ambassadeur there was an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Loyola University, such as was given to le Maréchal Foch some years ago. Then they set out with Maurice de Simonin, the French consul-general, for the small towns and villages—Donaldsonville, Napoleonville, St. Martinville, New Iberia, in the bayou country.
A steamy morning mist lay on the roads. The French peasants, for that is what they are, trudged to work. But for the trailing moss on the live-oaks it was like a southern province at home, in real France. The men doffed their hats, whether or not they knew who it was that rode in the so beautiful automobile, The women answered questions volubly and swiftly appraised Mademoiselle's beauty of which they all spoke afterwards. At Napoleonville she made them catch their breaths when she laid her freshest bouquet at the base of a new memorial inscribed Aux Morts de la Patrie.