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“A kind critic of some of these sketches here reproduced from The Saturday Review has said of them that their tendency is to ‘counteract the wrong-headed reports of French and English antipathies by which two sympathetic neighbour-peoples are being estranged and exasperated.’ If this be true—and to some extent I hope it may be—the result is surely all the more gratifying because it does not proceed from any deliberate effort on my part to serve that end, but, as I have said, from my endeavour to convey to others the impressions I have received. The immortal Chadband may be said to have established the proposition that if a householder, having upon his rambles seen an eel, were to return home and say to the wife of his bosom, ‘Rejoice with me, I have seen an elephant,’ it would not be truth. It would not be truth were I to say of the Jeunesse of the Latin Quarter that it is callous and corrupt, or to deny that beneath the madcap, frolicsome temper of the hour can be felt the justness of mind and openness to great ideas that will put a curb on extravagance and give safe guidance by and by. And again of Paul and Pierre’s little lady friends, Mimi and Musette, mirth-loving, dance-loving daughters of Mürger—it would not be truth were I to report them in any sense wicked girls, or to deny that taking them where they stand their ways of feeling are straight though, no doubt, their way of life may go a little zigzag. And of Montmartre and her cabarets and chansonniers—it would not be truth were I to say that only madness and perversion reign in her cabarets, or to deny that true poets and genuine artists may be found amidst the false and hectic glitter of the ‘Butte.’ And of the man in the street who is neither poet nor student, the average Parisian of simply everyday life—it would not be truth were I to repeat the hackneyed phrase that he would overthrow the Republican Government to reinstate a Monarchy, being a Royalist at heart. True, storms rage about him; scandals break out beside him; ministries fall; presidents pass—did these storms and scandals represent Republican principles it might be said with truth that he paid them little heed. What is true, however, is that the qualities and principles he takes his stand by do not change or fall with ministries or pass with presidents: cultivating still the art of living amiably, rejoicing still over the beauties of his town, and not merely rejoicing over them, but respecting and protecting them, believing still, and with reason, in the greatness of his country, he succeeds where his rulers often fail, not merely in professing, but in practising the doctrine of liberty, equality, fraternity.”