He stopped abruptly.
“The spirit of provincialism, my friend, is nothing but natural patriotism,” he said. “I love my house, my town and my province because I discover in them the customs of my own village; but if I love my country, if I become angry when a neighbor sets foot in it, it is because I feel that my home is in danger, because the frontier that I do not know is the high road to my province. For instance, I am a Norman, a true Norman; well, in spite of my hatred of the German and my desire for revenge, I do not detest them, I do not hate them by instinct as I hate the English, the real, hereditary natural enemy of the Normans; for the English traversed this soil inhabited by my ancestors, plundered and ravaged it twenty times, and my aversion to this perfidious people was transmitted to me at birth by my father. See, here is the statue of the general.”
“What general?”
“General Blaumont! We had to have a statue. We are not 'the proud people of Gisors' for nothing! So we discovered General de Blaumont. Look in this bookseller's window.”
He drew me towards the bookstore, where about fifteen red, yellow and blue volumes attracted the eye. As I read the titles, I began to laugh idiotically. They read:
Gisors, its origin, its future, by M. X...., member of several learned societies; History of Gisors, by the Abbe A...; Gisors from the time of Caesar to the present day, by M. B...., Landowner; Gisors and its environs, by Doctor C. D....; The Glories of Gisors, by a Discoverer.
“My friend,” resumed Marambot, “not a year, not a single year, you understand, passes without a fresh history of Gisors being published here; we now have twenty-three.”
“And the glories of Gisors?” I asked.
“Oh, I will not mention them all, only the principal ones. We had first General de Blaumont, then Baron Davillier, the celebrated ceramist who explored Spain and the Balearic Isles, and brought to the notice of collectors the wonderful Hispano-Arabic china. In literature we have a very clever journalist, now dead, Charles Brainne, and among those who are living, the very eminent editor of the Nouvelliste de Rouen, Charles Lapierre... and many others, many others.”
We were traversing along street with a gentle incline, with a June sun beating down on it and driving the residents into their houses.