First Lecture by M. Le Roux.

The first of the Circle Francais series of lectures was given yesterday afternoon by M. Le Roux on the subject, "Le roman contemporain, est-il une peinture exacte de la societe Francaise?" M. Le Roux was introduced by Mr. James H. Hyde '98.

After expressing his appreciation of the work done for the French language in America by Harvard men, M. Le Roux said that no true insight into French life could be had through what is termed the "French novel." What the average foreigner knows of Paris, for instance, is solely the boulevards, the theatres, and the museums, while the home life, the "bourgeois" life, remains a closed book.

During the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries the French novel portrayed a society with a common ideal. The Revolution, however, broke the frame of this social life, and after the storm was past, each class withdrew to its own circle. The first half of the nineteenth century is well shown by Balzac, with its ideal of commercial honor. But the "bourgeois" class has not been able to receive the rich foreigner as it would like, and only today are they beginning to study and appreciate the energetic, laborious and commercial society of the New World.

The modern novelists have chiefly described only the exterior cosmopolitan life of a band of pleasure-seeking people, who, though styling themselves Parisians, are not true Frenchmen. What M. LeRoux purposes to study in his lectures, is not the caricaturists, but the painters of the French home life, which is so little known abroad. Many of these writers are known personally to M. Le Roux, and it is through them that the various aspects of true French can be seen.

The second lecture on "Flaubert, comme peintre de la France du Nord," will be given in Sanders Theatre tomorrow at 4.30 p. m.

Today M. LeRoux will lecture at Smith College.