JOURNEY AROUND MY ROOM (Voyage au tour de ma chambre). We owe this ((exquisite
as the French admir ingly call it, to a happy accident. Xavier de Maistre (1763-1852) having been arrested as a young officer for duelling was sentenced to con finement for six weeks. He wrote 42 chapters, one for each day, descriptive of his wanderings around his room. He had no thought of pub lishing the work, but his elder brother, the philosophic writer, Count Joseph de Maistre, secured its publication. It is a little the irony of fate that, as David says in his introduction to the volume containing it in the French series known as the
animal make coffee in the morning, and some times, lost in happy memories or occupied with poetic distractions, permits the animal without sense in such matters to burn itself with the fire irons or do something equally foolish. A favorite mode of journeying, since he is not hurried, is while seated on an armchair to lift the forelegs a few inches from the floor and then, swinging backward and forward, to move gradually, almost imperceptibly, around the room. Almost invariably his animal makes his way toward the portrait of a charming lady that hangs on the wall. Thirty years after