Mayor Mitchel, and LaFollette.  In America we get little politics out of the theater.  In France, where they distrust the newspapers, they get much politics from the theater.  The theater is free in France—­and apparently not so closely censored as the newspapers.  We learned that night at the revue of a coming cabinet crisis, before the newspapers announced it.  And in learning of the crisis we had this curious social experience, which we modestly hoped was quite as Parisian as the Revue.  During the first act of the show it was Greek to Henry and me.  We could understand a vaudeville show, and by following the synopsis could poke along after the pantomime in a comedy.  But here in this revue, where the refinements of sarcasm and satire were at play and that without a cue, we were stumped.  Henry was for getting out and going somewhere else.  But we had a dollar a seat in the show and it seemed to me that patience would bring results.  And it did!  A good-looking, middle-aged couple sat down in the seats next to us, and the woman began talking English.  She was sitting next to me, so it was my turn, not Henry’s to speak.  We asked her if it would be too much trouble to interpret the show for two jays from Middle Western America.  She replied cordially enough.  And she gave us a splendid running interpretation of the show.  The man with her seemed friendly.  We noticed that he was slyly holding her hand in the dark, and that once he slipped his arm around her when the lights went clear down.  But that spelled a newly married middle-aged couple, and we would have bet money that he was a widower and she, late from his office, was at the head of his household.  Between acts he and Henry went out to smoke, leaving me with the lady.  We exchanged confidences of one sort and another after the manner of strangers in a strange land.  When it occurred to me to ask:  “What does your husband do for a living?”

“My—­what?” she exclaimed.

“Your husband, there?”

“Who—­that man?  Why, I never saw him in my life until I picked him up in a cafe an hour ago!”

And she got from me a somewhat gaspy “Oh.”  But we had a good chat just the same and she told me all about the coming fall of the cabinet.  Her type in America would not be interested in politics.  But the shows of the boulevards discuss politics and the theaters are free!  So her type in France had to know politics.  It takes all kinds of people and also all kinds of peoples to make a world.  And the war really is being fought so that they may work out their lives and their national traditions freely and after the call of their own blood.  If we are to have only one kind of people, the kind is easy to find.  There is kultur!