likeness to them—for which cause the deities, the greater, fairer, and more divine mortals may be, persecute them the more by misfortune and annihilate them, while they graciously spare the little, ugly, mean mammalian-like of mankind, and let them flourish in prosperity? If this last melancholy view be true, then are the French much nearer to their fall than any other race upon the earth. Ah! may the example of their Emperor teach the French what is to be hoped for from the magnanimity of England! Did not the Bellérophon long since destroy this chimæra? May France never trust in England as Poland trusted in France!
But should the most terrible disaster come to pass, and France, the motherland of civilisation and liberty, be lost by frivolity and treason, and the dialect of Potsdam nobility be heard snarling in the streets of Paris, and dirty German boots again defile the holy ground of the Boulevards,[1] and the Palais Royal again smell of Russian
- ↑ This will remind some of my older American readers of the indignant outbursts of the Richmond newspapers when the feet of the "Northern hordes" first defiled "the sacred soil" of Virginia. "C'est tout comme chez nous." In the French version "noble pavé." But, oddly enough, it has all come to pass as Heine predicted—even to the Russian leather, for I lately observed in the Palais Royal a shop where they sell beautiful objets de fantasie made of the objectionable material.—Translator.
