Andrew Gallix offers here a dazzling and provocative note, a report from the front, on literary Modernism and Paul Valéry's famous sentence "The marquise went out at five" conceived as a critique of the traditional, conventional, realistic, well-made (pick your own epithet) novel, or, really, anything that smacks of the prosiness of prose, of mere communication. Valéry's line cleaved to the centre of the debate: Would you write a novel or a story or an essay containing a sentence as mundane as "The marquise went out at five" or not? As Gallix points out, it's become a shibboleth in France for a certain kind of traditional (dull) writing. Not so much over here where prose dominates the market place. Something to think about.