For the Soul of France

France’s malady is its need to speechify.”

Wilhelm refused, and the matter might have rested there had Bismarck not made the refusal sound contemptuous by mischievously editing a telegram from Wilhelm to Louis-Napoléon.

It was France’s misfortune and originality, a journalist observed in 1861, that since the Revolution every form of government had been regarded as a usurpatory improvisation by one camp or another. Twenty years later, the remark still held true.

De Lesseps’s grandiosity, or capacity for self-delusion, made him, like Eugène Bontoux, an exceptionally effective promoter.

“I will not dwell on his shameless, intolerable associations with all that is worst on the extreme left, his absolute subordination to M. Clemenceau, his debasing intimacy with the men of La Lanterne.”

pride. Your science is beautiful, and necessary, and invincible; but you accomplish little by enlightening the mind if you do not cure the eternal wound of the heart.

One consoles oneself for not knowing foreign lands by supposing that one knows one’s own country at least, and one is wrong; for there are always areas of one’s own land that one has not visited, and races of men who are new to one. I experienced this fully then. I felt that I was seeing these Montagnards for the first time, so greatly did their mo

“Time in his forward flood shall grow ever more dignified,”

The past was, above all, a refuge from the dangerous mobility of people and things. It was stillness, order, containment. “The qualities I love in the past are its sadness, its silence, and most especially its fixity. Everything that moves disconcerts me,” wrote Barrès (who must have reconciled his aversion to movement with his cult of “national en