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visit to Germany ten years before had been disappointing, since his films were unknown, and himself unrecognized. This second visit showed clearly that in the intervening years Chaplin's popularity had reached the same peak it had attained in England and France and America. In Berlin, he fell in love with Nefertiti; and for years the statue he bought of her stood in his home, and possibly still does.
In Paris, he was nearly torn to pieces by a crowd that had waited day and night to see him arrive. His fame and his popularity had been sustained for ten years upon the incredible peak he had discovered in 1921. In 1931, with City Lights, he conquered the world again.
It is fitting that Chaplin should supply the swansong of silent film, an art that was extinguished in full bloom. As A Woman of Paris was a milestone in the history of film because it inaugurated a new genre, so City Lights was another, in that it marked the end of an epoch in film.
t©^ The Humanist in Society
FIVE YEARS ELAPSED BETWEEN THE RELEASE OF "CITY LIGHTS"
(1931) and that of Chaplin's next film, Modern Times (1936).
His second visit to Europe in 1931 compensated for the troubled early years of his work with United Artists. It was made abundantly clear to him, everywhere in Europe, that his popularity had not suffered through his sensational divorce, nor through the sudden boom of talkies. Unbounded enthusiasm, adulation, worship and, still more important, genuine affection for "Good old Charlie!" or "Ce cher Chariot!" helped to heal the sickness of spirit he had endured since the Gold Rush.
His mercurial spirits soared, and he gave himself up to a prolonged holiday on the Cote d'Azur, in Biarritz, as far afield as Algeria, and then in St. Moritz. One or two chosen friends shared the holiday with him, and none more closely than the young May Reeves, an AustroHungarian girl who had joined the Chaplin entourage in Paris to help with the international fan-mail that was pouring in from all quarters. May Reeves, who was at home in six languages, was invaluable to a harassed staff, until Chaplin's eye was taken by her unusual beauty. As so many times before, Syd Chaplin and Carl Robinson watched anxiously, dreading the next entanglement, marriage or scandal that might develop.
May Reeves, swept off her feet by the impetuous Chaplin, found herself suddenly launched into an unending social whirl, for Chaplin was pursuing his vacation with the same energy and dynamism that marked his film work. She found him an enchanting and difficult