Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 92, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 April 1916 — SOLITUDE IS ROSTAND’S CURE [ARTICLE]

SOLITUDE IS ROSTAND’S CURE

French Poet Spends All His Time in Bed, With All Noises Forbidden. Paris. —A friend of Edmund Rostand says that the poet is taking an isolation cure of three months, which he is passing in bed in his house at Cambo. He sees nobody except one servant, everyone takes pains not to make any noise in the house, and the poet receives no letters nor communications with the outside world except through newspapers, the war accounting for this compromise of what would otherwise be a perfect isolation. M. Rostand’s beard has grown fast, and the servant who attends him says that he is now unrecognizable. He has taken one or two *of these solitude cures before, once when he was working on “Cyrano” and once when he was slightly ill. He is not working particularly during this cure, except for some reading. He was feeling out of sorts for several weeks before he took it, which accounts for his decision. His friends say that these cures have a remarkable effect on his health; he gains a great deal of weight during them, loses his habitual nervousness, recovers his powers of working hard and generally becomes his old, genial self again. It is said that he discovered the treatment himself and that it was against the advice of'physicians that he undertook it for the first time.