SOURCE: "Paul Morand," in Contemporary European Writers, The John Day Company, 1928, pp. 66-71.

In the following excerpt from a study written in 1927, Drake compares Morand to the Roman writer Petronius and perceives Morand's work as moral rather than depraved, hut lacking in conviction and depth.

Anatole France, in a preface much quoted by reviewers, once called Marcel Proust "a depraved Petronius." As much might be said, with much more truth, of Paul Morand, but with this difference: that Morand's talent is by instinct moral, and not depraved. In the collections of character sketches which are his most natural and as yet his most satisfactory expression, Tendres Stocks, Ouvert la Nuit, Fermé la Nuit and L'Europe Galante, we have a long sequence of brilliant clinical notes on post-war European society. His single novel, Lewis et Irène, is little more than an elaboration upon the same theme, in the...