Proto-Cubism cubes": In light of the headway made by Cézanne, the multiple use of the word "cube" with reference to diverse works by diverse artists, and the other factors involved (political, social, cultural), it has been suggested that Cubism, with its proto-phase, would have emerged regardless of Picasso's intervention. The art historian and collector Douglas Cooper viewed Cubist painting to have been the beginning of a stylistic revolution which was inevitable. The American art scholar and MoMA curator William Rubin argued that Braque, with his commitment to a Cézannist syntax, would have created early Cubism had Picasso never existed. Pablo Picasso's
20th-century French literature Valéry and Larbaud). In the novel, André Gide's early works, especially "L'Immoraliste" (1902), pursue the problems of freedom and sensuality that symbolism had posed; Alain-Fournier's novel "Le Grand Meaulnes" is a deeply felt portrait of a nostalgic past. But radical experimentation was not appreciated by all literary and artistic circles in the early 20th century. Popular and bourgeois tastes were relatively conservative. The poetic dramas of Edmond Rostand, especially "Cyrano de Bergerac" in 1897, were immensely popular at the start of the 20th century, as too the "well-made" plays and bourgeois farces of Georges Feydeau. Anatole France, Maurice Barrès, Paul