[In the following excerpt, Walkley commends Morand's knowledge and depiction of London, as illustrated in Tendres Stocks.]

[Today] there are French writers who appear to be thoroughly at home among us and to know England "like their pocket." And yet, even with these knowing ones, England seems to assume an unreal, exotic air. I take up a book published by the Nouvelle Revue Française—Tendres Stocks, by Paul Morand—which is a triad of short stories or studies encircling three remarkable young ladies, and I find it crammed with the intimate topography, not to mention the manners and customs, of Oxford and London. Piecing the autobiographical fragments together, you learn that the author was at an English school (where he had to do battle for the national French nightgown against his pyjama'd school-fellows), was in England at the outbreak of war, went to the front, and returned to become an Oxford undergraduate (the indications point to Magdalen). He shows a peculiarly intimate knowledge of Oxford—the after-war Oxford, serious, laborious, that has displaced the pre-war Oxford with its Clarendon dances and its daily Clicquot (but in what college was that?), which in its turn displaced the Oxford of the early Georges, when the students ruined themselves in "turn-outs" and kept mistresses. He knows Mesopotamia, and Banbury Road, which he has learnt to call "Banbury"—as full, he says, of Wordsworth Houses and Keats Lodges as of nursemaids. He even knows that "town" come out on the river in the summer and assume the air of "gown," careful about feathering their oars and keeping the right side of the river, and calling one another "Sir." All this is simply prodigious in a Frenchman; you see how far you have got from the Venice-of-the-North generation !

But Oxford, after all, is (be it said with all reverence) a small place, and its anfractuosities, as Johnson would have called them, are soon penetrated. London is quite another thing. There are as many million Londons as there are Londoners. Many of us love it for the comparative ease with which you can live out of it and can avoid knowing more of it than your own particular little corner. And what is called London "life" (I mean the sort of life depicted in the illustrated papers and on the films and in agoramaniac plays and on the posters and in the "novel of the season") is for many of us a sheer nuisance and often only a rhetorical expression. Fortunately, there is enough of London to go round and to suit all tastes, and for my part I like even those parts of London that I have no intention of exploring, when Mr. E. V. Lucas writes about them.M. Morand seems to know almost as much of London as Mr. Lucas and some Bohemian sides of it, I conjecture, even better. He says it is a town that never quite satisfies you, but that spoils all the others for you. He has wandered over it from Ebury Street to the confines of Epping Forest, from Upper Tooting to the route of Motor-bus No. 19, which (he asserts) takes you to Islington. He describes to me in detail a London which I only know vaguely by hearsay and revels familiarly in haunts which I have never had the temerity to approach. One of his young ladies inhabits an old court-house disused since the reign of George IV (it would seem to be Battersea way); another a house once the house of Lord Byron. He dines and dances at Murray's. Or he feeds at Old Shepherd's in Glasshouse Street, which he likes for its massive tables, low ceiling, toasting fork, and buffet froid decked with jonquils in ginger-beer bottles. In the next compartment he can see "la calvitie cossue de Sargent et la tignasse de Roger Fry." Is there such a place? He sups with Montjoye, or rather Aronsohn ("an old Norman family," says Daniel), who is private secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and has Adam-style rooms in the Albany, with black satin armchairs painted by Couder. Is there such a person? Perhaps M. Morand is intentionally mystifying us. And my "perhaps" only shows how easy it is for a Londoner not to know his London, not to be able to discriminate between fact and fiction about it. In any case, M. Morand obviously did not invent Ebury Street and Bus No. 19. He tempts me to go and inspect both—but perhaps they would be disappointing, without the glamour of youth. He is very young, M. Morand, and the rackety existence he appears to have enjoyed in London would be far too uncomfortable for an old fogey.