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Updated: June 22, 2025
None had the peculiar verve and dash of Take Ionesco, but one or two were decidedly "smooth" in a grave, slightly heavy way, and all suggested stubbornness, intense patriotism, and a keen eye for the main chance.
Ionesco writes a long, double-leaded editorial every day, and very often he prints with it the speech, or speeches, he made the night before. In a time like this, he says, those of his way of thinking can't say too much; they must be "like the French Academicians, who never stop writing."
Their temperament and culture were different, to be sure, but they were both idealistic, sentimental people, to whom things of the mind and spirit were important. It seemed particularly unfortunate that everything should be done to force them apart instead of bringing them together. Mr. Ionesco listened with some impatience. Unfortunate, no doubt, but what do you wish?
In their editorials and speeches Ionesco and his followers were jingoes trying to drive the nation to a Rumanian Sedan. "A people is great, not only for its numbers of soldiers, but for its civilization, its artists, and intellectuals. A nation militarized is marked for eternal death, for a people lives by its thought and not by force."
The Rumanian tricolor was no nearer Buda palace when I returned several months later, but Mr. Ionesco was no less hot for war. Even if Germany won, he said, they still should go in, because they would at least keep their own and Germany's respect. "Go to war?" the phrase was inexact. "We have been at war for eleven months, only others are firing at us, but we are not firing at them.
Ionesco and those who agree with him belong, it will be observed, with the romanticists they are for the bright face of danger, great stakes, and, win or lose, putting all to the touch. Those who did not agree with them were men without souls, hagglers and traders, as if a nation could figure out the number of cannon-shots and prisoners, and go where the going's good!
Take Ionesco, who, more than anybody else, is the voice of those who want war. Once in the government, but at the moment out of it, Mr. Ionesco keeps up a continuous bombardment of editorials and speeches, and with his-vigor, verve, and facility reminds one a bit, though a younger man, of Clemenceau and his L'Homme Enchainé.
Ionesco one evening in Bucarest a porte-cochere opening into a big stone city house, an anteroom with a political secretary and several lieutenants, and presently a quiet, richly furnished library, and Mr. Ionesco himself, a polished gentleman of continental type, full of animation and sophisticated charm, bowing from behind a heavy library table.
He had always regretted not having children, never so much as to-day; but if he had a dozen sons, and knew that all of them would fall in the war, he would not be cast down. People accused him of working for himself. Who was Take Ionesco in comparison with the fate of a race?
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