the whole boulevard twinkles with their rose-coloured lights. Yet beneath them go men in blouses and women in aprons who might be taken for peasants. At Paillard's you will hardly dine for less than a sovereign; but there are a thousand places where you can fill yourself for 4d. The bicycle is almost a solecism in Paris by now, and the petroleum tricycle or landau whirrs in and out the traffic at twenty miles an hour. Yet the fiacre still crawls rheumatically

over the cobbles at two miles an hour, and the cocher has not yet begun to learn to drive. Steam tramways will carry you twenty miles out of Paris; yet the omnibus is slower, heavier, uglier, more uncomfortable than a prison-van.

You see that your neighbour in a restaurant bows and smiles with a gracious charm that makes you feel a cub and a barbarian. Then you take up a 'Libre Parole' and find one of the most influential men in France signing his name to a responsible article in this significance: "I understand that the indignation of Frenchmen over the trio of rascals trading as Loew, Bard, and Manau"-M. Loew ranking as the most venerable judge in France, the others grave legal functionaries, and their crime being that they decided the Dreyfus appeal according to the evidence.

Paris is full of these contrasts, and the reason for them is in itself a paradox. Paris is the unchallenged capital of civilisation, yet Paris is the most insular

spot in the whole world. We are called insular, but the most aboriginal islander of us all would be cosmopolitan compared to the Parisian. Paris has dropped

She

out of the world through her own cleverness. has been too far ahead to lead others, and now she is too proud to keep step. If the new amuses her she runs wild over it; but if not, as long as the antiquated is her own, she is well pleased with it. Full of amenity, of beauty, of intelligence, she has made a life for herself which satisfies her, and she cares nothing at all for the world outside. The Parisian knows no language but his own, no other literature, no other manner of thought, no other mode of life. He has heard of the achievements of other peoples, but he has no concern to study, still less to imitate, them. He is quite satisfied that the world must come to Paris, and never dreams of troubling himself to go to the world.

It chanced, on a day, that a newspaper brought out a placard announcing "Automobilism in the Sudan!" I supposed it was the advertisement of a circus; yet, after all, it was a serious project. A gentleman who made a remarkable and courageous journey in the neighbourhood of Timbuctoo was about to make a Sudan expedition in motor cars. He observed that much of his route was suitable to the automobile, and he pertinently pointed out that if automobiles had been running in the Sudan, Marchand need not have

!

taken two years to reach Fashoda, and Kitchener need not have troubled about the desert railway. All you want in order to get from anywhere to anywhere is automobiles, and plenty of them. He has not, I fancy, explained what you do in those not inconsiderable parts of the Sudan which are not suitable to the automobile. Probably he smiles to himself; but to explain things like that is not the Parisian point of view. Paris is logical: the petroleum tricycle is successful in the Rue de la Paix; therefore it must be successful in Timbuctoo.

De Lesseps made the Suez Canal; therefore, argued Paris, he could make that of Panama. The extraParisian circumstance that Panama was not Suez did not come into reckoning. Préfets and procureurs and chefs de bureau are necessary to Paris; therefore they are necessary to Pondicherry. France cannot exist without her army; therefore a general is sacred. Enthymemes like these make France great at home and ineffectual abroad.

I visited one fine Sunday a little town just over twenty miles from Paris. I dined in the inn- a couple of cyclists from Paris yawning at the other side of the table, a local notary and a couple of friends at the top. Afterwards, as I was in possession of no French money, I proposed to pay the bill with a sovereign. A sovereign is currency in the remotest village of Norway, in Turkey, in Egyptian

mud-bazaars,—in places, indeed, where a white man has hardly ever been seen. But the French innkeeper, twenty miles from Paris, had never seen a sovereign; he had never heard of one, and he absolutely declined, though with the utmost politeness, to bid more than twenty francs for it.

That is a parable of the state of things in France. In England we are troubled and grave, preparing our fleets, regretful that France will be our enemy, that France insists on war. But if war came, nobody would be more utterly astounded than France. France in bulk really pays almost no attention to critical State questions. If we declared war France would consider it a most unprovoked aggression, even as she regards the plain-speaking of our journals as mere mud-hurling. For, in truth, the queen of civilisation is wholly and hopelessly provincial.

112

IL

THE DAY OF THE DEAD.

ON All Souls' Day Paris is in mourning. When you look at the streets-women muffled in crape, and men walking funereally in black trousers-—you would suppose that some plague had fallen on the city. Nearly half the people you meet abroad seem going to a funeral. Their faces are rigid, their gait demure. It is the Day of the Dead-the day that follows All Saints' Day, the day which in Catholic countries is given up to the pious petitionings for the "Souls of the Faithful Departed.” 1

The principal place of pilgrimage is Père Lachaise, the great cemetery of Paris. It lies in the northeastward part of the city in a squalid quarter-as squalid, that is to say, as Paris, the bright, can ever be. You approach the cemetery through high,

1 I have here taken the liberty to turn Mr Steevens's naturally untechnical, and therefore not quite accurate, phrase into the actual terms in use, according to the general customs of the Roman Church in England.-ED.