ere quite prepared to treat me as an intelligent man of
a different sort, and to show me as much as I could understand....

Let me confess that de Tessin had had to persuade me to go to
Headquarters. Partly that was because I didn't want to use up even
ten minutes of the time of the French commanders, but much more was it
because I have a dread of Personages.

There is something about these encounters with personages--as if one was
dealing with an effigy, with something tremendous put up to be seen.
As one approaches they become remoter; great unsuspected crevasses are
discovered. Across these gulfs one makes ineffective gestures. They do
not meet you, they pose at you enormously. Sometimes there is something
more terrible than dignity; there is condescension. They are affable. I
had but recently had an encounter with an imported Colonial statesman,
who was being advertised like a soap as the coming saviour of England.
I was curious to meet him. I wanted to talk to him about all sorts of
things that would have been profoundly interesting, as for example his
impressions of the Anglican bishops. But I met a hoarding. I met a thing
like a mask, something surrounded by touts, that was dully trying--as we
say in London--to "come it" over me. He said he had heard of me. He
had read _Kipps._ I intimated that though I had written _Kipps_ I had
continued to exist--but he did not see the point of that. I said certain
things to him about the difference in complexity between political
life in Great Britain and the colonies, that he was manifestly totally
capable of understanding. But one could as soon have talked with one of
the statesmen at Madame Tussaud's. An antiquated figure.

The effect of these French commanders upon me was quite different from
my encounter with that last belated adventurer in the effigy line. I
felt indeed that I was a rather idle and flimsy person coming into the
presence of a tremendously compact and busy person, but I had none of
that unpleasant sensation of a conventional role, of being expected to
play the minute worshipper in the presence of the Great Image. I was so
moved by the common humanity of them all that in each case I broke
away from the discreet interpretations of de Tessin and talked to them
directly in the strange dialect which I have inadvertently made for
myself out of French, a disemvowelled speech of epicene substantives and
verbs of incalculable moods and temperaments, "_Entente Cord