b to his
pipes, and after she has vanished in the lingering wind, he blows
sweeter music through his seven reeds. The symbol is not difficult to
decipher. And who would not succumb to the languorous melancholy of
Andromede, not chained to a rock but living on the best of terms with
her monster, who calls her Bebe! The sea bores her profoundly. She
looks for Perseus, who doesn't come; the sea, always the sea without a
moment's weakness; in brief, not the stuff of which friends are made!
When the knight appears and kills her monster, he loses his halo for
Andromede, who cherishes her monstrous guardian. Perseus, a prig
disgusted by the fickleness of the Young Person, flees, and the death
of the monster brings to life a lovely youth--put under the spell of
malignant powers--who promptly weds his ward. In Lohengrin, Son of
Parsifal, the whole machinery of the Wagner opera is transposed to the
key of lunar parody. What ambrosia from the Walhalla of topsyturvy is
this Elsa with her "eyes hymeneally illumined" as she awaits her
saviour. He appears and they are married. Alas! The pillow of the
nuptial couch becomes a swan that carries off Lohengrin weary of the
tart queries made by his little bride concerning love and sex and
other unimportant questions of daily life. This Elsa is a sensual
goose. She is also a stubborn believer in the biblical injunction:
"Crescite et multiplicamini," and she would willingly allow the
glittering stranger Knight to brise le sceau de ses petites solitudes,
as the Vicar of Diane-Artemis phrases it. The landscapes of these
tales are fantastically beautiful, and scattered through the narrative
are fragments of verse, vagrant and witty, that light up the stories
with a glowworm phosphorescence.

Salome and her celebrated eyebrows is a spiritual sister of Flaubert's
damsel, as Elsa is nearly related to his Salammbo. She dwells in the
far-off Iles Blanches Esoteriques, and she, too, is annoyed by the
stupidity of the sea, always new, always respectable! She is the first
of the Salomes since Flaubert who has caught some of her prototype's
fragrance. (Oscar Wilde's attempt proved mediocre. He introduced a
discordant pathological note, but the music of Richard Strauss may
save his pasticcio. It interprets the exotic prose of the Irishman
with tongues of fire; it laps up the text, encircles it, underlines,
amplifies, comments, and in nodules of luminosity, makes clear that
which is dark, ennobles much th