SOURCE: "Adventures, Globe-trotters, and Imagists: Valery-Larbaud, Pierre Mac-Orlan, Paul Morand, Jean Giraudoux," in Modern Thought and Literature in France, Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1934, pp. 122-48.

A French-born American critic and eductor, Michaud specializes in French literature but also has published studies of contemporary American literature and the modern American novel. In the following excerpt, he finds Morand's employment of description and imagery original though tending toward excess.

[In] 1921 Tendres Stocks [Green Shoots] appeared with a preface by Marcel Proust, a quaint title for three portraits of modern young women in an English setting. Proust, in his preface, pointed adroitly to what already appeared as Morand's qualities and defects. His sketches revealed a clever imagist and a magician, but perhaps he exaggerated the trick to the point of eccentricity. To fight routine he did not hesitate to twist reality and subject it to maquillage, and his methods were those of...