Nothing pleases him so much as a
great scandal in England; he will gleefully bring you a paper
containing the account of it, to prove how true is his opinion. It
is quite useless to explain to the British mind, as I have often
tried to do, that all Frenchmen do not pass their lives drinking
absinthe on the boulevards; and as Englishmen seem to leave their
morals in a valise at Dover when off for a visit to Paris, to be
picked up on their return, it is time lost to try to make a Gaul
understand what good husbands and fathers the sons of Albion are.
These two great nations seem to stand in the relation to each other
that Rome and Greece held. The English are the conquerors of the
world, and its great colonizers; with a vast capital in which
wealth and misery jostle each other on the streets; a hideous
conglomeration of buildings and monuments, without form and void,
very much as old Rome must have been under the Caesars, enormous
buildings without taste, and enormous wealth. The French have
inherited the temperament of the Greeks. The drama, painting, and
sculpture are the preoccupation of the people. The yearly
exhibitions are, for a month before they open, the unique subject
of conversation in drawing-room or club. The state protects the
artist and buys his work. Their CONSERVATOIRES form the singers,
and their schools the painters and architects of Europe and
America.
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