ITALY: Old Fool

“Women are bewitched by the divine spirit firing my soul. When this sublime force fills me, my face blazes with love, and I am transformed into an object of admiration. I beckon to women and they come to me.”

Thus, to awed and adoring Italian newsgatherers, spoke the Prince of Montenevoso, famed as Gabriele D’Annunzio, upon the theme, “Why I Fascinate Women.”

Signer D’Annunzio, foremost of Italy’s poets and World War heroes, spoke outside the canons of Anglo-Saxon good taste but spoke the truth. None the less, Hearst Editor Brisbane, conqueror upon no field of arms, and certainly of no spirit so exalted as the great Duse’s, was moved to carp, last week, at Poet Gabriels, 62.

Mr. Brisbane, 62, wrote: “Marvelously ugly, completely bald, physically feeble, spiritually a giant, it is pleasant to know that D’Annunzio is happy in his old age, and that with genius, as with common men, there is no fool like an old fool.”