Paris, June 9.
Many " Parisian has just mentally shed a sympathetic tear over the death of Polin, the music-hall singer and actor, who has finally retired from the world's stage at the age of 64, for Polin was a represent-Jative figure of the pre-war period to which everyone looks back with egret. It must be quite 80 years since he began to appear in the red trousers, blue tunic and Kepi of the French infantryman and to sing topical songs with a finesse which contrasted most effectively with his carefully cultivated pretence of playing the simpleton, He hed the knack 0: songs which not merely were humourous and topical bug reflected the sentiments and tendencies of his contemporaries and were of a much higher order of merit than the British music-hall ditty with its threadbare allusions to drink and mothers-in-law.
Polin's earliest success was "La Petite Tonkinoise," which began with the lines An Tonkin jo xis parti It went on to describe an East-West Jove affair of the kind subsequently placed on a higher artistic plane in "Madame Butterfly." "Ca vows four de memo quelques chose" and "Lenatomie clu consent" were other songs which delighted a generation, of his countrymen, but hhis greatest triumph' was La Madelon," which he produced few months before the war. France it became what "Tippera was to the British, and even now cannot hear its refrain without being carried back to the terrible days of 1918. Polin was far more than an ordinary music-hall "turn." He figured successfully in comic opera, and he even played Moliere at the Comédie Frangaive on a special occasion, and did it very well.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.