institutions, and eats at them; the Englishman admires them, and eats elsewhere. There are about twenty Établissements Duval, all in admirable positions, all over Paris, and one of them looks clean. Into this one I ventured one day.

As you go in a sort of turnkey at the door gives you a card, or score-sheet. It is characteristically arranged, not according to foods, but according to prices; as you eat, the waitress fills up-one 40 centimes, two 10 centimes, and so on. I tried hard to run up a big score, and ate all the most expensive things I could see on the card. I ate, and ate, and ate till I was ashamed to occupy the seat longer; at the door I found I had spent 1s. 101d. I doubt whether so much had ever been spent there before -only I was very, very nearly as hungry as when I came in. The Duval, in my experience, is a snare. The food is not nice, and it is not filling at the price. But the Parisian eats of it with joy and saves his

sou.

But on

If it were only not worse than that! every pound of meat, every pint of oil, every ton of coal, every roll, every egg that comes into a French. house the servant gets commission-a sou in every franc. It is even so with the washing-bill-and mark that the bonne's clean caps and aprons are provided by the mistress. It is remarked that the bonne's caps and aprons soil remarkably fast. Similarly

the beef never returns to the table, the widow's cruse is quickly empty, the coal vanishes, the rolls are too stale to eat, the eggs break. Housekeeping is very much dearer in Paris than in London, and servants return to their villages with dowries.

The

Everybody you come across is scraping up sous. Buy a penny bunch of violets on the boulevard and pay with half a franc. It is even money: the flower-girl will slip a sou between three pennies by way of change; thereby she stea-saves a sou. very respectable, crape-veiled lady on the tramcar, who puts her child on the seat beside her to keep somebody else out, will catch it up on to her knee as the conductor appears, and pay for one place only. Three sous to the good! Everywhere you will find waiters, tradesmen, cashiers systematically passing bad coin; by this means as much as five or even ten sous can be saved at a time. Everybody is saving sous; everybody is grasping, mean, dishonest.

No: that is exaggerated. It would be as absurd to say that everybody in France is dishonest as to say that everybody in England is honest. But it is no exaggeration to say that whereas in England honesty is the rule, in France-at least towards foreigners-it is the exception. France has a dozen virtues which we lack; but common honesty, which to our mind is the beginning of virtue, France has not. Instead, she has sous.

THERE is something very wrong with France. Foreigners say so, Frenchmen say so; therefore that much must be admitted. Only, what?

It is not merely that nobody has any confidence in the Government, the Chamber, the Army, the Church. It is not merely that nobody has any confidence in his neighbour. The amazing thing is that nobody seems to have any confidence in himself. Some profess confidence in a vague entity called France meaning by that, apparently, not so much the mass of Frenchmen, as a kind of natural growth and recuperation which has always brought France out of her troubles, and is trusted to do so again. But everybody leaves it for France to do by herself without the aid of Frenchmen.

There are half-a-dozen symptoms to be gathered from a single morning's newspapers. A turn in foreign politics, let me say, looks unfavourable.

In

stead of looking inward to her own strength, France looks outward for allies, Germany, if you like, the generation's enemy-but anything rather than be left alone. A nation offends them: "Cowards!" they cry; "some day you shall pay for this." The influence of the Jews is in question: half the voice of Paris is nervous silence, the other half is not less nervous hysteria. That the Anglo-Saxon means to destroy the Latin is no longer doubted; and instead of defying him, Paris asks what it is that makes him her superior.

And a worse symptom than any of these: M. Henri Rochefort will tell you, it may be, that the Government is in possession of certain important facts acquired by opening at the frontier the private, the very intimate, correspondence of the German Ambassador's daughter. It is a silly story, you say; but it is not too silly to be copied into every paper in Paris. The thing actually occurred; and the astounding thing was that to not one single paper-that I could find- -did it seem to occur how blackguardly, and at the same time how abject, must be a Government that could take such measures for its security. Some believed the story, some doubted; all tacitly agreed that it was natural that a Government should do such things. Afterwards, as I heard the story, Count von Münster had to go down to the Quai d'Orsay and point out, not

for the first time, that unless such stories were officially denied he would be obliged to remove to a country where public men behaved like gentlemen. On this the Government denied the fable-saying, vaguely, that it had been published in the press, and not daring to accuse, much less to punish, M. Rochefort as author of the fairy tale.

If you start, though, to detail the weakness of the French Government, you will never be done. The whole series of irritations inflicted on this country during the last few years is due to nothing else. Its author has been the Colonial party. Now the Colonial party in France is weak, but it is just stronger than the Government. It is not the Foreign. Office, but men like Prince d'Arenberg, that send out the Mizons and the Marchands; the Government fears the inevitable complications, but dares not risk attack by a "No."

As for the interior policy of France, it is just an equilibrium of weaknesses. Orleanists, Buonapartists, Republicans, Socialists, Church, Army-they all hold each other in check, because not one of them has a policy or a man. Either would do; not one of the groups can produce either. Not so many years ago it took at least a general, like Boulanger, to threaten a coup d'état; now men talk openly of a Marchanda junior major, and the son of a carpenter.

Then is France utterly hopeless? You would say