GLAMOUR OF YORE 



Those who have read the curiously original novel which, 

 like so many first attempts at fiction, is autobiographical 

 autobiographical as to feelings, if not necessarily as to 

 facts may remember his description of the Rnglish boy's 

 early " French days / " and, later on, of the mature man's 

 poignant impressions on revisiting the old playground of 

 his life. Now, there were so many points of resemblance 

 between the surroundings of Du Maurier's hero's child- 

 hood and my own/ so many allusions to the kind of 

 things and the kind of people I had once been familiar 

 with but, as time flowed on, had dismissed from mind as 

 removed from real existence and new workaday points of 

 view / they were presented, moreover, in so sympathetic a 

 manner, that one need hardly wonder at the sudden resolve 

 that rose within me, to go and look up the old place again. 

 Such a desire, when it comes, has something of the twist 

 of hunger about itit is we fringale, to use a word for 

 which, oddly enough, we have no counterpart. But, alas ! 

 delight in scenes of the beau temps jadis is not to be 

 recaptured ! It may but be espied in fitful, elusive glimpses. 

 The world has moved on and the genius loci has fled. 

 Have you ever found out that the return, after many 

 years, to a place oft dreamed of until then and with never- 

 failing tenderness, besides leaving you blankly unsatisfied, 

 seems to have killed the glamour, to have broken the magic 

 spell of memory ? The dream is dispelled. It will hence- 

 forth nevermore haunt your pillow, you have seen the 

 phantom of the past with the eyes of nowadays/ the 

 new picture has replaced that of the dream for ever. 

 Well, la boite Delescluze~as we irreverent youngsters 

 called that respectable institution unlike those other 



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