Proto-Cubism that Metzinger was the first to recognize explicitly and implicitly the significance of the use of "a free, mobile perspective", and the "mixing... of the successive and the simultaneous". He was the first to write of the fact that artists had abandoned traditional perspective and were now free to move around their subjects to paint them from various points in space, and at various moments in time. Metzinger's role at center of Cubism both as a painter and theorist prompted Guillaume Apollinaire to write of Picasso, Braque and Metzinger as the first three Cubist painters. Now well beyond the teachings
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