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Taine's Portrait.
69
completed its boundaries, fortified its most vulnerable point, and, to use the words of Vauban, 'made its field square,' separated from 4,000,000 of new Frenchmen which it had assimilated after twenty years of life in common, and, worse still, thrown back within the frontiers of 1789, alone, diminished in the midst of its aggrandized neighbours, suspected by all Europe, and lastingly surrounded by a threatening circle of distrust and rancour."
