bar mustaches, must have taken place about 1900. In this one story she sums up better than might an entire exegesis, the eternal drama of those who worship virility, moreover she shows us once and for all and realistically what must have been the life of someone like Marcel Proust, who, leaving the salon of the Countess Greffulhe, would go in search of laborers or milkmen.

Pepe was a Spaniard of the old nobility he was small, rather stiff in his manner chaste because his very timidity kept him so, and rather pleasantly homely He was helplessly mad for blue, gold, and crimson, for masculine beauty and those blond young men upon whom manual labor imposed the wearing of blue coveralls. Every day around six o'clock Pepe could be found leaning on the railing at the entrance to the subway watching entranced as there emerged from the darkness below the stocky blond necks of workmen clad in every possible shade of blue. Now one day that six o'clock flood which, as it empties the metallurgical and electrical workshops, pours out on Paris all the blues of the forget-me not, the cornflower the larkspur the gentian and squill, brought Pepe face to face with a new and the nameless shade of blue together with a mop of dazzlingly golden hair which hung loosely over the face it framed.

"Ah murmured Pepe, "Vercingetorix!"

He clasped both hands to his smitten heart and bit his lips. Now a man has every right to whisper aloud the name "Adele" or 'Rose", or even, in public, kiss the portrait of a lady but stifle he must a name like Ernest or Jim. Pale, hesitant, like one marching to his death, Pepe followed Vercingetorix. The collar of his jacket, the folds of his elbows, even his galoshes sparkled with freshly cut filings, and sometimes the ends of his gigantic mustache, swinging in the evening breeze, whipped all the way back around his neck. Suddenly he turned to enter a tobacco shop swerving so unexpectedly that he brushed against Pepe. Grazed by the point of his mustache, like the tip of a whip, Pepe staggered. "I beg your pardon, sir" said Vercingetorix.

“I must be dreaming," Pepe said

to himself, or perhaps I'm going to die. He apologized. He looked at me. He's just looked at me again. Where are my knees? My legs don't know what they're doing, and yet I'm moving I'm following him, I'm

And then he stopped thinking at all, for Vercingetorix, looking back, flirtatiously and teasingly had smiled at him again.

"I felt then, said Pepe, that agonizing feeling which warns one in sleep that an enjoyable dream is about to end. But I could not have stopped. A half hour later I was climbing, behind my Vercingetorix, a steep narrow stairway and then I was sitting down in a very clean, very quiet tiny room, where there must have been muslin curtains, for everything seemed very white. Vercingetorix had said 'Sit down, and he'd disappeared behind a glass-paned door It seemed as though I was alone for a long time. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I kept saying to myself 'What if he kills me What if he kills

and I couldn't help thinking that this would be the most glorious thing which could possibly happen to me. Finally the door opened and Vercingetorix

He clasped his childlike fists and beat them one against the other "No, not Vercingetorix! There was no more Vercingetorix! A monster He had put on a silk shirt, open at the neck and do you know what he had on his head? A I scarcely dare tell you

He swallowed hard and made a gesture indicative of nausea.

pom-

"A crown of pompom roses pom roses with leaves and ferns And those beautiful mustaches. It was beauty defiled, a shameful masquerade

And then, as he said nothing a bitter expresion on his face, I asked "And then, Pepe, what happened then?"

'What happened? Nothing happened, of course,' he said horrified. "Perhaps you don't find my story funny enough for you. I left left him something on the table.39

But let us not get the wrong idea. In 1900, despite the International Exposition which, according to Prefect Chiappe, had brought on Paris. a very troublesome wave of homosexuality perhaps because of the