BETWEEN US

A strong current of opinion demands that Lamartine's family home in Milly become national property and thus be saved from any possible destruction or transformation. It is a very simple house and will probably not cost much to acquire. It is to be hoped that the necessary sum will be found.

Lamartine, poet of delicate souls, politician, great traveler, despite everything that attracted him to Parisian glory, remained nonetheless attached throughout his life to his native land. Not only did he love the landscapes for their beauty, the vineyards for the income he earned from them, but also the peasants, his neighbors, for the frank and harsh sympathy he received from them.
Witness this little-known letter that Lamartine wrote to a humble farmer who, having read the first volume of Jocelyn and unable to obtain the second, addressed the poet to obtain it:
"Sir, your letter has deeply touched me. I have never received a testimony of esteem that has given more value to my feeble works. To nourish and console the spirit of a poor, isolated and honest family; to be in intimate communication with the thoughts that rise from the cottage; to have one's name in the memories and in the blessings of the good man who does not know you, but who loves you, this is, in my opinion, true glory and you have given me the feeling of it."
I therefore hasten to come and thank you with my own hand, thinking that it will be more agreeable to you than by a foreign hand, and I have Jocelyn's volume sent to you by courier; I enclose my Voyage en Orient, a work in prose that will perhaps interest your family in winter evenings."
Continue to relax from your manual labors by these readings, and do not be distressed by your condition as a country worker; work is the general law, ours are perhaps no less painful than yours; the mind has its sweats like the body. God blesses them equally and will one day give us the same salary without considering whether we have made poems or furrows."
I wish you a long life, an honest family and daily bread." It is under the somewhat unusual aspect of a friend of the peasants that Lamartine reveals herself in this letter. In this capacity, she deserved to be remembered.

WE have just celebrated in England the eightieth birthday of Queen Alexandra, the widow of Edward VII. This princess was always loved by her people because of her simplicity, her modesty and her taste for the intimacy of the "home", personification of the primordial virtue of the English woman. When Queen Alexandra, under the reign of her husband, was obliged to appear in some official ceremony, she had only one desire, to escape. She suffered from the smallest details of etiquette, so complicated, as we know, among our neighbors.
Thus, at the coronation of Edward VII, the royal ordinances that had fixed the length of the train of the princesses' mantle were applied to the letter. A baroness wears, in fact, a train two meters long; a viscountess has the right to fifty centimeters more, and so on, adding an equal supplement at each level of the hierarchy up to the duchess, who has the right to four meters. Similar provisions govern the number of rows of ermine that adorn the mantle, from the baroness who has the right to two rows of ermine to the duchess who has eight.
No ordinance has fixed the length of the train that queens must wear. But there are precedents. Mary Stuart trailed twelve meters of velvet behind her, and Elizabeth of Austria, marrying Charles IX, trailed twenty meters. At the coronation of William IV, Queen Adelaide's train was so heavy that, by the sole effect of its own weight, it tore the bodice of the one who wore it and fell to the ground to the great scandal of those present.

THE INDISCREET.