As I sat staring at the column of the Bastille, inscribed
to Liberty and Glory, there came out of one corner
of the square (which, like so many such squares, was
at once crowded and quiet) a sudden and silent line
of horsemen. Their dress was of a dull blue, plain
and prosaic enough, but the sun set on fire the brass
and steel of their helmets; and their helmets were
carved like the helmets of the Romans. I had
seen them by twos and threes often enough before.
I had seen plenty of them in pictures toiling through
the snows of Friedland or roaring round the squares
at Waterloo. But now they came file after file,
like an invasion, and something in their numbers,
or in the evening light that lit up their faces and
their crests, or something in the reverie into which
they broke, made me inclined to spring to my feet
and cry out, “The French soldiers!” There
were the little men with the brown faces that had
so often ridden through the capitals of Europe as
coolly as they now rode through their own. And
when I looked across the square I saw that the two
other corners were choked with blue and red; held
by little groups of infantry. The city was garrisoned
as against a revolution.
Of course, I had heard all about the strike, chiefly
from a baker. He said he was not going to “Chomer.”
I said, “Qu’est-ce que c’est que
le chome?” He said, “Ils ne veulent pas
travailler.” I said, “Ni moi non
plus,” and he thought I was a class-conscious
collectivist proletarian. The whole thing was
curious, and the true moral of it one not easy for
us, as a nation, to grasp, because our own faults
are so deeply and dangerously in the other direction.
To me, as an Englishman (personally steeped in the
English optimism and the English dislike of severity),
the whole thing seemed a fuss about nothing.
It looked like turning out one of the best armies
in Europe against ordinary people walking about the
street. The cavalry charged us once or twice,
more or less harmlessly. But, of course, it is
hard to say how far in such criticisms one is assuming
the French populace to be (what it is not) as docile
as the English. But the deeper truth of the matter
tingled, so to speak, through the whole noisy night.
This people has a natural faculty for feeling itself
on the eve of something—of the Bartholomew
or the Revolution or the Commune or the Day of Judgment.
It is this sense of crisis that makes France eternally
young. It is perpetually pulling down and building
up, as it pulled down the prison and put up the column
in the Place de La Bastille. France has always
been at the point of dissolution. She has found
the only method of immortality. She dies daily.
