“Now I come to think of it,” said Martin, “I suppose it is. I represent the more or less educated middle-class Englishman, and, so far as I am aware of any influence on my life, everything outside of England that has moved me has been French. As far as I know, Germany has not produced one great work of art or literature during the last forty years.”
“Voilà!” cried Bigourdin, “how could a pig of a country like that produce works of art? I haven’t been to Berlin. But I have seen photographs of the Allée des Victoires. Mon cher, it is terrible. It is sculpture hewn out by orders of the drill sergeant’s cane. Ah, cochon de pays! But you others, you English—at last, after our hundred years of peace, you realise how bound you are to France. You realise—all the noble souls among you—that your language is half Latin, that for a thousand years, even before the Norman conquest, all your culture, all the sympathies of your poetry and your art are Roman—and Greek—enfin are Latin. Your wonderful cathedrals—Gothic—do you get them from Teutonic barbarism? No. You get them from the Comacine masters—the little band of Latin spiritualists on the shores of Lake Como. I am an ignorant man, Monsieur Martin, but I have read a little and I have much time to think and—voilà—those are my conclusions. In the great war that will come——”
“It can’t come in our time,” said Martin.
“No? It will come in our time. And sooner than you expect. But when it does come, all that is noble and spiritual in England will be passionately French in its sympathies. Tiens, mon ami—” he planted himself at the corner of the dark uphill road that led to the hotel, and brought his great hands down on Martin’s shoulders. “You do not yet understand. You are a wonderful race, you English. But if you were pure Frisians, like the German, you would not be where you are. Nor would you be if you were pure Latins. What has made you invincible is the interfusion since a thousand years of all that is best in Frisian and Latin. You emerged English after Chaucer—Saxon bone and Latin spirit. That is why, my friend, you hate all that is German. That is why you love now all that is French. And that is why we, nous autres Français, feel at last that England understands us and is with us.”
Having thus analysed the psychology of the Entente Cordiale in terms which proceeding from the lips of a small English innkeeper would have astounded Martin, Bigourdin released him and together they mounted homewards.
“I was forgetting,” said he, as he bade Martin good-night. “All of what I said was to prove that if you were in need of a foster-mother, Périgord will take you to her bosom.”
“I’ll think of it,” smiled Martin.
He thought of it for five minutes after he had gone to bed and then fell fast asleep.
Early in the morning he was awakened by a great thundering at his door. Convinced of catastrophe, he leaped to his feet and opened. On the threshold the urbane figure of Fortinbras confronted him.
“You?” cried Martin.