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It is funny to think of this poor little Frenchman, a Parisian too, eating our most un-French victuals, our beefsteaks, and roasts, and various homely puddings and hams, and all things most incongruent to his hereditary stomach; but nevertheless he eats most cheerfully and uncomplainingly.
Whilst a riverside walk at Nevers presents nothing but cheerful bustle and an aspect of prosperity, here you approach the Allier through scenes of squalor and torpid neglect. The poorer inhabitants, too, are very un-French in appearance, wanting that personal tidiness characteristic of their country people in general.
Being an American, Madame was almost lavish about fires. And it was a most un-French room, the most careless little place, where the second-best piano lived, and the lilacs, when they were taken in out of the cold. There were sweet old curtains, and a long sofa in front of the fireplace instead of the traditional armchairs. Anybody's books and bibelots lay about. I was playing." "What?"
They followed him without speaking and watched him closely as, with an intentness quite un-French, he bent down to see farther through the trees, examined the branches for newly-broken twigs, the displaced stones, the crushed mosses, disturbed grass, and soft places of the ground, and the little indications read and looked for by trappers and Indians.
And I believe it is in revolt against, perhaps in terror of, this profoundly un-French spirit that the younger Frenchmen are seeking shelter and grace under the vast though unconscious nationalism of Derain. For the French have never loved Cubism, though Braque uses it beautifully. How should they love anything so uncongenial to their temperament?
The last shred of esteem which I still tried to retain for the 'first lyrical theatre in the world' was at last rudely destroyed when I saw how such an empty, altogether un-French work as Donizetti's Favorita could secure so long and important a run at this theatre. During the whole time of my stay in Paris I do not think I went to the opera more than four times.
He was thirty years old before he began even temporarily to live in France: he had only lived there some five or six years when he wrote his first famous piece, so un-French in all its spirit; and the ideas of the Social Contract were in germ before he settled in France at all. There have been two great religious reactions, and the name of Geneva has a fundamental association with each of them.
This life, whose dreary superficiality is covered by the glitter of universal blague, like the stupid clowning of a harlequin by the spangles of a motley costume, induced in him a Frenchified but most un-French cosmopolitanism, in reality a mere barren indifferentism posing as intellectual superiority.
A person speaking English and bearing an English name, had better be English, for if he cannot it shows, it proves, that there is something wrong in him. Our misfortune is that our tradition, and perhaps our inclination, obliges us to be un-English, whereas we do not trouble ourselves to be un-French, or un-Italian, for we are so by nature.
The weak and foolish notion of falling back upon what they had gained, and of contenting themselves with that, was all they thought of; and the un-French, unpatriotic temper of Paris which wanted no native king, but was content with the foreigner, gave them a certain excuse. We could not even imagine London as being ever, at any time, contented with an alien rule.
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