Their love of money is a cold terrible passion; acquisition is not for them, as for Americans, a romance involving recklessness, imagination, and some other of the virtues to be found in higher adventures, but a cold, steady, ignoble thing rendering them capable of any baseness, any cruelty. The Americans gamble for high stakes boyishly, risk everything, and desire money for the power it brings; the French run no risks, play safe, and desire money from an ignominious fear of poverty. Their fixed universal longing is to become rentiers. No French government either dares or desires to tax income adequately. Nor are they generous with money, like the Americans or like the Italians, though they are rich and the Italians poor. A French girl may have every quality to fit her to become an exemplary wife and mother, but unless she has a dot she must die a spinster.
And as in their love of money, so in a multitude of other ways are the French small and sordid of spirit.
They are without generosity. They never give something for nothing. And therefore they are incapable of gratitude.
They will not concede superiority of whatsoever sort to another race, and when, as at the Olympic Games, this is demonstrated beyond question, they grow peevish and ill-mannered.
They are narrow. Once having made up their minds they never change them. Alone among the nations to-day, they will not admit that the Treaty of Versailles was other than righteous or that the Allies had any share of responsibility for the war.
They detest Americans because America is rich, Italians because the Italian race is strong and prolific, the English because England would leave Germany a nation, and all these and all the others because they are not French.
They are infinitely more insular than the English. All that they touch they Frenchify. Read any French romance of ancient Athens or Alexandria, and you feel yourself at once dishearteningly on the Boulevards. They know little, and care less, about contemporary life in any other country than their own. They are smug.
Their press is corrupt to—and beyond—the point of blackmail, and, by comparison with theirs, American politics are lily-white.
One Frenchman in every five is a government employee. Nowhere else does there exist so limp, obstructive and deadening a bureaucracy.
In the long run, I find something cheap in their love of thrilling phrase, of effect, of dramatic climax, because to it they sacrifice truth. There was something cheap in Victor Hugo, who could write of Napoleon: ‘This man had become too great. He inconvenienced God.’ There was something cheap in Napoleon himself. There is a strain of cheapness in Anatole France.