All Astir Mary K. Bercaw Edwards Click for larger view View full resolution Program cover for the Thirteenth International Melville Society conference, Melville's Energies: Aesthetics, Politics, Ecologies. Thank you to Matt Kish for the use of his art on the cover. Image courtesy of Matt Kish and the Thirteenth International Melville Society conference. [End Page 121] The Thirteenth International Melville Society conference, Melville's Energies: Aesthetics, Politics, Ecologies, which ran in Paris, France, June 27–30, 2022, was magnificent. The conference was hosted at several venues: Sorbonne Université and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle situated in the Quartier Latin, which Melville explored during his 1849 trip to Paris, on days 1 and 4, and Université Paris Cité on days 2 and 3. We wish to offer our deepest thanks to the conference committee—Thomas Constantinesco (Sorbonne Université), Hélène Cottet (Université de Lille), Michael Jonik (University of Sussex), Ronan Ludot-Vlasak (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), Édouard Marsoin (Université de Paris), and Cécile Roudeau (Université de Paris)—for the superb skill and grace with which they ran the conference. Thank you all. The next issue of Leviathan (25.1, which will appear in March 2023) will include the keynote lectures by Jennifer Greiman and Jeffrey Insko, conference reports by Alex Benson, Tony McGowan, Chris Rice, and Maki Sadahiro, and a photo gallery. For many of us, one of the great joys of the conference was simply being together again. An event that I will always cherish is when a large group of Melville scholars visited the Musée de Cluny during the Wednesday afternoon optional tours. Our tour guide, who was excellent, had taken us to the frigidarium, or cooling room, in the remnants of the third-century Gallo-Roman baths known as the Thermes de Cluny. When Melville visited what was then called the Hôtel de Cluny in 1849, six years after the museum first opened in 1843, he had explored the tunnels beneath the frigidarium and wrote of them in Chapter 41 of Moby-Dick: [T]ake your way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes; where far beneath the fantastic towers of man's upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state; an antique buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages. Tim Marr asked the guide if we, too, might go down into the tunnels, and she secured permission from a security officer and took us down. The tunnels are now empty, but in Melville's time, they were filled with antiquities from throughout Paris. We were so excited to be within the tunnels. Seeing our interest, the tour guide then took us to an exhibit on the history of the Musée de Cluny, which included a painting of the tunnels done by a French realist just about the time of Melville's visit that showed them filled with antiquities. As we milled about filled with excitement, Tim Marr read aloud the Hôtel de Cluny passage from Moby-Dick, creating one of the great moments of the conference. [End Page 122] Click for larger view View full resolution Melville scholars in the tunnels beneath the frigidarium of the third-century Gal-lo-Roman baths known as the Thermes de Cluny. Melville visited these same tunnels during his 1849 visit to Paris and wrote of them in Chapter 41 of Moby-Dick. June 29, 2022. Photo credit Mary K. Bercaw Edwards. Melville conferences have not ended with Paris. There will be two Melville sessions at the MLA conference, which will be held in San Francisco, California, January 5–8, 2023. Carrie Tirado Bramen will chair a panel entitled "Melville and His Critics" that "will reflect on how Melville has signified in critical works and will explore the stakes of these critical reflections." Jennifer Greiman will chair a second panel on "Melville's Style: The Matter of Mind, Life, Art, Politics" that will "will engage such new approaches to the broad question of style in Melville's work...