THE FOOD PROBLEM IN PARIS.
The cost of living in the vicinity of the Peace Conference has been enormously exaggerated. Likewise the difficulty of reorganizing Europe on a truly ethnic basis. By combining the two questions I have found them immensely simplified, and I have been in Paris only three days.
My meaning will be clearly illustrated by the record of a single day's experience—with the representative of the Dodopeloponnesians for déjeûner and the delegate of the Pan-Deuteronomaniads for dinner.
I made the acquaintance of the first in the lift. On the way down it came out that I was journaliste assisting at the Conference of the Peace, whereupon the other introduced himself as secretary of the Dodopeloponnesian delegation and eager for the pleasure of entertaining me at déjeûner.
Nothing international arose in connection with the hors d'oeuvres. It was between the soup and the fish that my host inquired whether I had yet found time to look into the just claim of the Dodopeloponnesian people to the neighbouring island of Funicula.
"You mean," I said, "on the ground that the island of Funicula was brought under the Dodopeloponnesian sceptre on September 11th, 1405, by Blagoslav the Splay-fingered, from whom it was wrested on February 3rd, 1406, by the Seljuks?"
"Precisely," he said. "But also because the people of Funicula are originally of Dodopeloponnesian stock."
"Yet they speak the language of Pan-Deuteronomania," I said.
"A debased dialect," he said, "foisted upon them by a remission of ten per cent. in taxes for every hundred words of the lingo learned by heart, with double votes for irregular verbs."
The entrée, something with eggs and jelly, was excellent.