Ill-fortune often brings countries far more closely together than does good fortune. After the execution of Charles I, English, Scottish, and Irish loyalists fled to France, and lived there long years of a not unhappy exile. Louis XIV gave them a magnificent welcome. He presented the Stuarts with one of his most comfortable palaces, one, too, within an easy distance of his own palace at Versailles; and when you read the enchanting, intimate letters of Madame de Sévigné to her daughter, you will see how much the two courts intermingled, and what a constant coming and going there was from France to England and from England to France. When Charles II became king he did not forget his French friends. In fact I think it may be whispered that he remained far more of a Parisian than a Londoner, and you will feel this too if you ever read the letters he wrote to his beloved sister, the fascinating Henrietta, who had married the brother of Louis XIV.
England was very English in the eighteenth century, but, even so, there was constant intercourse between London and Paris. English names occur almost as often as French ones in the correspondence of the famous Madame du Deffand, and the best picture of the French society of that day is to be found in the letters of her old friend, Horace Walpole. Marie Antoinette had many dear English friends, and Englishwomen as well as Englishmen were made very welcome by her, not only in the Palace of Versailles, but at her own beloved Petit Trianon.
So close was the tie then between the two countries that they read as a matter of course each other’s books. Innumerable little girls in France are now called Clarisse because of a wonderful story, written by an English bookseller named Benjamin Richardson, called “Clarissa Harlowe.” Equally in this country, few, if any, children were named Clare or Julia before the publication of “La Nouvelle Héloise,” written by the Jean Jacques Rousseau to whom I alluded in my first chapter.
You might have thought that the great Revolution would have broken the old connection between the two countries and the two capitals. So far was this from being the case that there were many people in England who sympathised with the aims of the Revolution. Others, while regarding all that went on in the France of that day with horror, yet felt their affection for France and the French people become closer. An affectionate familiarity between the two countries was further encouraged by the sudden appearance in England of thousands of French people, who, known as the Emigrés, were largely composed of members of the French nobility who had escaped from France on the eve of the great Revolution. Many of them lived in England till after the Battle of Waterloo, and our grandmothers were all taught French, dancing, and the harp by lady Emigrées.
Even the Napoleonic Wars did not really break the links binding France and England. In some ways they may even be said to have strengthened them. Not only were our troops always on the Continent, but Napoleon occasionally made a great sweep of any English travellers he could catch, either in France, or in the countries which he successively conquered. These unfortunate people were what would now be called “interned” in various French towns, where in some cases they were compelled to remain for years. But I am glad to tell you that these forlorn creatures were treated most kindly by their French neighbours, and when they finally came back to England, so fond had they become of France that some of them used to go back there for two or three months of each year.
Gradually, it is difficult to say why, the two countries drifted apart. Indeed it began to seem that the nearer they grew together in a material sense—the less and less time it took to get from London to Paris, for instance—the less all that was best in French art and in French life, appealed to English people.
One thing that perhaps made the English nation distrust the French was France’s constant change of rulers. After France had had a king for a few years she would suddenly change about and have a republic; then would come a king again, another small revolution, and then an emperor! It was during the reign of an emperor, Napoleon III, that Paris became for the first time the playground of Europe, the place where foreigners went rather to amuse themselves in stupid ways, instead of to see beautiful things and to meet agreeable and interesting people.
Then, quite suddenly, there came a terrible day, just forty-four years ago, when the playground of Europe became a battle-ground, and when, with surprise and horror, England saw that the French, busily engaged in amusing themselves and other people, had entirely neglected to get ready for the awful thing, War, which had suddenly come upon them. As a result of this neglect, Germany, for the first time in their joint history, conquered France.
So easily, so surprisingly quickly, was this conquest achieved, that it made the Germans get what is vulgarly called “swelled head.” It also undoubtedly led to their confident belief that everything must go well with them in the present war. But France, as Germany now knows to her bitter cost, had learned her lesson. Without spending nearly so much time and thought on war, and the terrible engines of war, as Germany had done for forty years, she yet prepared quietly and soberly for the big conflict which, unlike England, she felt quite sure must be coming on Europe, if only because of the extraordinary preparations which she noticed her bullying neighbour was continually making.