Excerpt from The Rapin

IN the rooms of my friend Otto Struve there hangs a parrot cage containing a somewhat de jected-looking lark. It was given to him by Gus tave Garnier, the man who took the Prix de Rome last year-or was it the year before? - and whose picture of a girl was bought by the state for I do not know how many thousand francs before it had hung a fortnight in the Salon. A story connects the painter and the picture and the bird - a story whose name ought to have been Célestin but for that eternal unfitness of things which makes the comedy of real life an inverted image of the com edy of romance and demands for the story of Célestin the title of Toto, or, if it please you.

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