I have mentioned but a few of the princes of talent.
To keep her hand in practice, she makes the conquest of Algeria, and, later on, having nothing else particular in hand, she takes it into her head to make the Suez Canal, a gigantic undertaking, which of itself would be enough to save the nineteenth century from oblivion. Ever enamored of great names, she re-establishes the Empire, because there is a man in the world who bears the name of the victor of Austerlitz. Smitten once more with that strange malady, the love of glory, she fights Russia in 1855 to prevent her from going to Constantinople, and Austria in 1859 to create Italian unity. Then comes that terrible year, the year 1870. With an army of 350,000 men, she sanctions a war, like the child that she is, with a nation, which for sixteen years had been silently preparing to avenge her defeat at Jena, and which had 1,200,0000 men ready to take the field. She is conquered, and, alas! humiliated. She pays her conquerors $1,000,000,000, but this she has almost forgotten, and sees wrenched from her two provinces that she loved and was beloved by; this she will never forget. The following year, she holds up her head, the richest and most esteemed of European nations. To-day, if she only had a leader, republican or monarch, she would be the strongest.
Ah, dear Foreigners all over the world, respect her, that beautiful France! I have often heard the sincerest and most intelligent of you say that no country in the world would probably have been able to do as much.
THE END.
FOOTNOTES
[1] If my memory serves me, it was one of our wittiest vaudevillists who once laid a wager that he would get an encore, at one of our popular theaters on the Boulevard, for the following patriotic quatrain:
"La lâcheté ne vaut pas la vaillance,
Mille revers ne font pas un succès;
La France, amis, sera toujours la France,
Les Français seront toujours les Français."
He won the bet.
The London badauds are at present nightly applauding, at the Empire Theater, a patriotic song which begins by the following words: