BROOMSTICK (With zest): Avant — Propos. You must help me with this, Bowl. My knowledge of French is not absolutely penetrating.

BOWL: Well, avant-propos means preface.

BROOMSTICK (Imitating Bowl): Claire Madeleine Colombier Dupray, the writer of the — m — the extraordinary poems gathered together in this volume, was born — m — in Geneva, of French parents. During the first fifteen years of her life she lived with her parents in Geneva, receiving instruction from her mother, a Calvinist, a woman of pronounced devotional character, and of wide reading.

Cat goes behind Broomstick and looks over his shoulder. Bowl paces up and down the stage.

BROOMSTICK: It will interest my readers — What a nice old touch that is! — It will interest my readers to know that Madame Dupray —

BOWL (With force): Madame?

Cat puts his finger on the word over Broomstick’s shoulder.

CAT: Mademoiselle, mademoiselle.

BROOMSTICK: I always confuse them. It will interest my readers to know that Mademoiselle Dupray still has in her possession some of the books from which she first became acquainted with — m — literature, in her early years.

BOWL (Protesting): Still has? Her early years?

CAT: Jeunesse. Youth.

BROOMSTICK: The abbott of Bellozane’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives, Florio’s Dictionary, a volume of Du Bellay … There is a list of twenty or thirty in all. I shall skip them.

Bowl is visibly affected.

BROOMSTICK: I gather that the books were selected by her mother. Piquant reading for a young French poetess.

Cat takes the book from Broomstick and runs with it to Bowl.

CAT: Here is something about the portrait. Translate it, Bowl.

Bowl looks at the preface. He seems incredulous. He looks at the portrait and then at the preface, and again at the portrait. He throws the book on the floor.

BOWL: What a fool I have been!

He hurries off the stage. Cat is dumbfounded. Broomstick laughs loudly. Cat picks up the book and returns it to Broomstick.

CAT: What does it say about the portrait?

BROOMSTICK: Well, just here, skipping a few lines, the sentence you saw reads as follows: The frontispiece of this volume was etched in Amsterdam, from life, after Mademoiselle Dupray, at the age of twenty-three, in the year —

He pauses.

CAT: At the age of twenty-three, in the year —

BROOMSTICK: Sixteen hundred and thirty-seven.

CAT: Sixteen hundred and thirty-seven! If she was twenty-three in sixteen hundred and thirty-seven, she was forty-six in sixteen hundred and sixty when her poems were published. She is more than fifty now — fifty-three. She will love as long as she lives.

BROOMSTICK (Cavalierly): I think you are right, after all, in your translation of rouges.

CAT: Oh, red, red! Acutely red! Damn all portraits of poets and poetesses.

Cat collapses. Broomstick laughs again, turning over the pages of the book.

BROOMSTICK: One should always read a preface first.

He helps Cat off the stage.

CURTAIN

The Death of a Soldier

Life contracts and death is expected,