“Have you ever been to England?”
“No, sire.”
“Well, when you do go—for you will go—you will see how strange it is. It resembles France in nothing. Over there are order, arrangement, symmetry, cleanliness, wellmown lawns, and profound silence in the streets. The passers-by are as serious and mute as spectres. When, being French and alive, you speak in the street, these spectres look back at you and murmur with an inexpressible mixture of gravity and disdain: ‘French people!’ When I was in London I was walking arm-in-arm with my wife and sister. We were conversing, not in a too loud tone of voice, for we are well-bred persons, you know; yet all the passers-by, bourgeois and men of the people, turned to gaze at us and we could hear them growling behind us: ‘French people! French people!’”
September 5, 1844.
The King rose, paced to and fro for a few moments, as though violently agitated, then came and sat beside me and said:
“Look here, you made a remark to Villemain that he repeated to me. You said to him:
“‘The trouble between France and England a propos of Tahiti and Pritchard reminds me of a quarrel in a café between a couple of sub-lieutenants, one of whom has looked at the other in a way the latter does not like. A duel to the death is the result. But two great nations ought not to act like a couple of musketeers. Besides, in a duel to the death between two nations like England and France, it is civilization that would be slain.’
“This is really what you said, is it not?”
“Yes, Sire.”