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NOUVELLES DE PARIS.

    Paris, March 3rd, 1919.

DEAREST POPPY,—­You know, don’t you, that I write for the Press?  You must write, ma chere, if you want to be dans le mouvement nowadays.  It’s getting to be almost as big a craze as jazzing and is quite as exciting.  It has its difficulties, of course, but so has the jazz roll.  And if you’ve got a title or have been mixed up in a cause celebre you can write on anything sans aucune connaissance speciale.  Camilla Blythely says she just sends in her photo and signature and those obliging newspaper people do the rest—­which is most helpful to a busy person.  But then we can’t all be as notorious as dear Camilla.

I hope it isn’t getting just a little overdone.  But I hear that lots of papers are offering only three guineas a column now for quite important signatures, while others actually insist on contributors writing their own articles.

Quant a moi, I’m writing up the light side of the Peace Conference.  I do those snappy pars about LLOYD GEORGE’S ties and CLEMENCEAU’S gloves and all those little domestic touches that people would much rather read about than such remote things as Czecho-Slovaks and Jugo-Slavs.  I did a most thrilling three columns about the hats of the delegates, from the bowler of Mr. BONAR LAW to the “coffieh” and “igal” headdress of EMIR FAISUL, the Arab Prince. (It’s always so effective if you can stick in a word or two like that that nobody understands.  You never need get them right).

Talking of odd words, the latest boutade over here is to find new names and epithets for our dress materials—­some of them quite weird.  If you want a silk tricot you ask for “djersador,” while a coarser texture is “djersacier”; “mousseux” now describes velvet as well as champagne; ninon is known as “vapoureuse"; while to make one of the newest Spring dresses you require only three-and-a-half yards of “Salome.”  Some of the couturiers in the Rue de la Paix are issuing fashion-pronouncing handbooks, while others have their own interpreters to assist customers.

The theatres over here are getting extremely—­well, what our grandparents termed “risques,” but it really goes further than that.  And the worst of it is my countrypeople seem to think it’s the smart thing to go to them, which they do most indiscriminately. Heureusement they don’t understand the stuff.  Whenever I see a most circumspect and highly proper British matron entering one of the Boulevard theatres nowadays I think what a mercy it is that we as a nation rely so much on pronouncing phrase-books for acquiring foreign languages.  It keeps one so single-minded in the midst of a wicked world.

But, after all, propriety is a question