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Everywhere, the parish priest, le pere, came forward from among his children to greet the visitors. The bayous lay peaceful, their margins painted by the springtime. M. Andre Lafargue, the district's chief historian, suggested to Ambassador Claudel that "only a poet can sing with truth the beauties of this blessed place."
The poet-ambassador nodded gravely and at St. Martinville, under the oak made famous by Poet Longfellow's Evangeline, he called to him a child with bright hair and kissed her on the cheek. This broke the tension of the moment, after the long orations and the formal reply. The Ambassador chatted lightly with a grandmother before departing. Did her grandchildren talk French at home? "They may talk English elsewhere if they please," she said, "but at home, in my presence, it is a different matter."
They made M. 1'Ambassadeur and Mademoiselle climb up on roots of the Evangeline oak and embrace its old trunk. The last farewells were said with handkerchiefs, fluttering all along the road.
Back in New Orleans, Ambassador Claudel presented a message, in 150 volumes, from 3,500,000 French schoolchildren to their "brothers and cousins in Lousiana" who had been threatened by a flood. Ten-year-old Marcel Claiborne, descendant of Louisiana's first governor under the U. S., accepted for his fellows. They all sang La Marseillaise and there were French folk-songs, too. "It is for this occasion I came to New Orleans," said M. Claudel, and returned to a world where the poetry of diplomacy must be scanned to fit immigration quotas, where the poetry of races is a forgotten art.
*Another daughter is named Reine, for their father's Royalist sentiments were strong indeed when he was a younger man. In Washington, Marie Antoinette Claudel drives a Chrysler roadster, rides horseback, plays tennis, dances, but does not "gad about" as do daughters of many another diplomatist.