* * * * *

_For you are a true poet and I will declare it freely, not concerning
myself more with the legends Parisians have the habit of weaving about
every celebrity. They admire Gauguin and Verlaine, not so much for their
originality, as for their eccentricities. And so it happens that certain
persons, unacquainted with the nameless sentiment, the order and purity,
the thousand interior virtues which guide you, persist in saying that
you wear your hair short and that Willy is bald._

_Must I then--living at Orthez--tell_ Tout-Paris _who you are, present
you to all who know you--I who have never seen you_?

* * * * *

_I will say then, that Madame Colette Willy never had short hair, that
she does not wear masculine attire; that her cat does not accompany her
when she goes to a concert, that her friend's dog does not drink from a
tumbler. It is inexact to say that Mme. Colette Willy works in a
squirrel's cage, or performs upon trapeze and flying rings, and can
reach with her toe the nape of her neck. Madame Colette Willy has never
ceased to be the_ plain woman _par excellence, who rises at dawn to give
oats to the horse, maize to the chickens, cabbage to the rabbits,
groundsel to the canaries, snails to the ducks and bran-water to the
pigs. At eight o'clock, summer and winter, she prepares the café au lait
for her maid--and herself. Scarcely a day passes that she does not
meditate upon this admirable book_:

A LADY'S COUNTRY-HOUSE