Something that had been a man came staggering back out of the poisonous swamps of the delta of the Dobrudja, and—more dead than alive—reached the port of Kustendje on the Black Sea, what time Protestant England and Catholic France had allied with the Moslem against Christian Russia; and Lord Dalgan, Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces, and H.R.H. the Duke of Bambridge, were being entertained by Sire my Friend, at Paris.
As though the out-at-elbows refugee, the borrowing adventurer, the temporary occupant of the Presidential armchair had never existed, you are to see him Sire my Friend as the Ally of Great Britain, the gracious patron and protector of the Sick Man. He had had his will; his plot had blossomed in this gorgeous flower of International War—the Allied Fleets were in the Black Sea—France was rent with the shouting of trumpets and the screaming of bugles; she quaked with the tramping of cavalry, the ceaseless passing of batteries of artillery, and trains of wagons and ammunition-carts. And day by day his crowded transports steamed for the East from Toulon and Brest and Marseilles.
He was happy. The Northern potentate who would not call him brother—the Army he had bribed with stolen millions to enthrone him—which he feared, and which openly ridiculed him—the English Sovereign and her Consort, who had despised and condescended to him—these were destined to drink of a cup that had taken years to mix.
England’s trust in him entertained him hugely. She took the leap, with all its tragic possibilities, like a generous horse ridden by a reckless sportsman at a killing fence; ignoring the deadly possibilities of the stake, and the barbed wire, and the back-breaking deep ditch beyond.
To gratitude, good faith, rectitude, loyalty to vows a stranger—all must smart sooner or later, who had trusted this man.... Thus, France paid in the end in other things than her virtue for that furious midnight ride upon the saddle-bow. But her new owner amused her; and she was prosperous, or seemed to be.
For this was the era of great Booms in zinc, and charcoal, and foreign bonds, and American steel rails. It was also the age of folly, flummery, flippancy, and frolic. The ponderous classicism of the Empire style, the rococo ugliness of the Monarchy, both were kicked into the dustbin on the arrival of the Second Empire. Gaudy colors, bizarre fashions, gay, sparkling music, chic saucy women, men who amused themselves—where Sire my Friend reigned, these reigned. Ashtaroth, Belphegor, and Belial were worshiped at the Tuileries and Compiègne. But the High-Priest of their mysteries improved Paris if he corrupted her—that must be allowed.
After Nero, he was possibly the greatest designer of landscape-gardens, the most gifted layer-out of streets and promenades, that has ever existed. He inspired Haussman. He dreamed in avenues wide enough to maneuver cavalry in; he thought in boulevards down which whole batteries of artillery could sweep. He who had been immured in a prison loved Freedom, Air, Light, Space—and he gave these good things to his capital. Also he gave her the Cocodette.
The lionne of 1848—of her we know something.... She was passionate, wayward, exquisite, and unprincipled. In three words, she was Henriette. But in exchanging her for the cocodette of the Second Empire, France paid in the resultant loss of beauty. With her limbs eased in the steel cage of the crinoline that hid the fault; with her little hat tilted above her mountains of bleached hair; with her fringe, her panniers puffed above the artificial deformity that later became the bustle—with her huge and tasteless lockets and chains, belts and dog-collars of precious metal—she is a type of the decadence of the Age of Sire my Friend.
The cocodette was giddy of brain, false from the love of deceit, impure without passion, hideous in the extreme; and knew not her absurdity or her ugliness any more than the Frenchwoman of to-day—whom her English and American sisters ape, in their hobble or harem skirts, and their waste-paper-basket hats, trimmed with patches of brocade, whole fowls, and lumps of velvet. Elegance has fled—Grace has departed—Good Taste conceals her face—Beauty has ceased to exist, in France, since Religion was abolished. How should it be otherwise when from His peculiar country, men have driven out God?
When the Athenians lost the sense of loveliness that lies in the pure vigorous line, that was the commencement of Greek degradation. In like manner the boneless ugliness called The New Art was a symptom of disease and decay. Buildings without angles are as faces without noses. Design that is all curves marks exhaustion in the brain that conceived it, and impotence in the hand that executed—nothing more.