Nude Gooseberry

Nude Gooseberry

Made in Germany, imported to France, is the cult of Nudism, a mulligan stew of vegetarianism, physical culture and pagan worship. The outstanding feature is that all devotees must live in a state of complete spectacular nudity.* Much publicity has been given the Nudist colony on an island in the Seine near Paris. Lively have been their arguments, moral, economic, religious, with Prefect of Police Jean Chiappe over the matter of bathing trunks. Some weeks ago a young French reporter paid a secret visit to the Nudist colony. So depressing, so disillusioning was his published account of the flabby spectacle that the romantic French press and public lost interest in the entire business.

But last week Nudism was again in the public eye. It was announced with complete gravity that suave M. Andre de Fouquieres, arbiter elegantarium, had joined the "Committee of Action" of Nudism, that he was a most earnest and enthusiastic apostle.

A U. S. parallel would be if elegant Editor Frank Crowninshield of Vanity Fair should suddenly appear as a vegetable-eating, hairy-chested Nudist. An acknowledged leader of Parisian society, always (heretofore) impeccably dressed, great-grandson of Chevalier de Groiseillez/- who was a noble governor of Flanders, Andre de Fouquieres shares with silk- stocked Berry Wall and wasp-waisted Marquis Boni de Castellane the title of Last of the Dandies.

In Germany too, Nudism was in the news. It was announced that at the Nudist retreat near Darmstadt an art exhibition would be held. All the exhibits were to be studies of the nude, and all visitors to the exhibition were expected to be as nude as the art.

In London the very Rev. William Ralph ("Gloomy Dean") Inge, author of Selections from the German Mystics, Personal Idealism and Mysticism, Types of Christian Saintliness, Speculum Animae, speaking last week to the Sunlight League, took note of Continental nudism and said: "There is nothing objectionable in it, but it is a matter of convention." He recited this limerick: Half an inch, half an inch shorter. The same skirts for mother and for daughter, When the wind blows, everything shows. Both what should and what hadn't oughter.

*Partial or low-church Nudists exist who hold out for gee-strings.

/- Knight of the Gooseberry.