"A whole nation!"
The bright eyes held Franky's sternly. He lifted his right arm, and the withered hand still shut upon the battered snuff-box shot up two fingers in vigorous protest. "Pardon, Monsieur—you are very seriously mistaken. France was never more Catholic at heart than now. How strange!—when but twenty-one miles of salt water divide Calais from Dover—when the Entente Cordiale has established between your country and mine nominally close and intimate relations; that so complete an ignorance as to the French Nation, its Government, its mode of thought, its moral, religious, and social conditions, should be found prevailing in Great Britain to-day!"
"My dear sir, you're off the bull—completely off!" protested Franky—Franky whose second sister was married to a Frenchman, Franky who knew Paris as well as the inside of his week-end suit-case, by Jove!
A deprecating shrug and a supple outstretched hand cut short the speaker.
"Pardon, Monsieur l'Anglais—I know what you would say to me! There is much force in the argument.... It is très sensée—and there is truth in it, and yet it is false—to be guilty of a paradox. The aristocracy of Great Britain, like her plutocracy, set high value upon much that comes from France. British gold is poured into my country in return for the newest and most fanciful modes in costume, millinery, and jewellery. And not only do your beautiful women adorn themselves with the inventions of our bold and original genius for ornament, but for your menus, your pleasures, the novels and plays that paint in intoxicating colours the joys of unchaste love and illicit passion, for the sensuous poetry that is garlanded with the flame-hued flowers of Evil, you are ready to praise and pay us lavishly, as though no nobler growth than this rank luxuriance sprang from the intellectual soil of France. Our vices—alas!—with the appalling diseases that spring from them, and the combinations of drugs that alleviate these—all find with you a ready market. And you attend our race-meetings at Longchamps and Auteuil, where English jockeys ride French and Irish horses—and you believe, you!—that you know the social life of France. No!—but you are ignorant—profoundly ignorant! May GOD be thanked that you misjudge us thus cruelly. For if my country were no better than Great Britain and other foreign nations believe her to be, it were time indeed for a rain of fire from Heaven!"
Hardly raising his voice above a clear whisper, the emotion and vehemence with which he spoke, and the swift and fiery gesticulations with which he illustrated utterance, made the sweat start out in beads upon his wrinkled forehead and cheeks. He wiped these off with the blue checked handkerchief, saying:
"Pardon! I grow warm when I speak of these things. I recognise that if in the judgment of other nations France is a courtesan drunk with lechery, or at the best un esprit follet, she has brought this judgment upon herself. Flippancy, the desire to faire de l'esprit under any circumstances—the bold and brilliant gaiety that is her exclusive and most beautiful characteristic—these have caused her to be misunderstood. But whatever else she be, she is not Pagan nor Agnostic. To believe that is to wrong her cruelly, Monsieur!"
Franky, by now hopelessly at sea, endured the hailstorm of swift, vehement sentences with an expression of amiable vacuity, his stiffly pendent hands plainly yearning for the refuge of his trousers pockets, his mind rocking on the waves of the stranger's passionate eloquence like a toy yacht adrift on the bosom of the Atlantic. And the resonant Gallic voice went on:
CHAPTER VIII
MONSEIGNEUR