.
Now my one wish is to work again." She reads a good deal. Her
favourite authors are Chateaubriand and Maeterlinck. In Maeterlinck
she loves the mystery. "We never know people properly," she says.
"They are just as difficult to understand as things that happen are.
We never know whose fault it is when good or bad things happen, and we
don't really know whether we ought to be angry or to be sorry with
people who do harm. Wicked people are like a thunderstorm, don't you
think? And a lazy woman is like a hot room. Both are unhealthy, but
they cannot help it."

Marguerite Audoux does not say these things to be clever. She says
them quite simply, and they express her natural way of thought, which
is simplicity and purity itself.

She wrote her book when and how she could, on scraps of cheap paper,
and she does not know herself, now, whether she hoped to have it
published when she wrote it. She did hope for publication when she had
finished it, but that was because she was hungry.

I met a friend just outside Marguerite Audoux's house after my first
visit to her. "Tiens," he said, "tu viens de la mansarde de Genie
l'ouvriere." And the clever little pun was true. Marguerite Audoux is
a genius, and she does not understand what people mean when they ask
her "how" she "writes." She opens her weak eyes very wide at the
question, laughs as a child laughs when it doesn't understand, and
says, "But I don't know. The thoughts come, and I write them down. I
only wish that I could spell them better."

When the committee of the Vie Heureuse was voting on her book before
awarding her the 200 pound prize for the best book of the year,
somebody suggested the possibility that she had had help with it.
Madame Severine was sent to fetch the manuscript. It was passed round,
examined, and no more doubt was possible.

I hope you will find the pleasure in reading Marie Claire that I found
in translating it. I should like to say quite earnestly--and perhaps a
little shamefacedly, because we hate saying these things out loud--that
when I had read it I felt awed. The book had worked upon me. Do you
remember the impression made on you by moonlight upon the snow in the
country? You must be quite alone to feel it. The purity of it all
makes you wish that you were a cleaner man or woman, and, till you rub
shoulders with people again, you mean to try hard to be cleaner and
better. Marie Claire made me feel just exactly like th