oliteness reigned, but politeness is compelled to throw off
cloak and jacket when it steps into the arena to meet the encounter of
a bull. Beauchamp drew on their word 'solidaire' to assist him in
declaring that no civilized nation could be thus independent. Imagining
himself in the France of brave ideas, he contrived to strike out sparks
of Legitimist ire around him, and found himself breathing the atmosphere
of the most primitive nursery of Toryism. Again he encountered the
shrug, and he would have it a verbal matter. M. d'Orbec gravely recited
the programme of the country party in France. M. Livret carried the
war across Channel. You English have retired from active life, like the
exhausted author, to turn critic--the critic that sneers: unless we copy
you abjectly we are execrable. And what is that sneer? Materially it is
an acrid saliva, withering where it drops; in the way of fellowship it
is a corpse-emanation. As to wit, the sneer is the cloak of clumsiness;
it is the Pharisee's incense, the hypocrite's pity, the post of
exaltation of the fat citizen, etc.; but, said M. Livret, the people
using it should have a care that they keep powerful: they make no
friends. He terminated with this warning to a nation not devoid of
superior merit. M. d'Orbec said less, and was less consoled by his
outburst.

In the opinion of Mr. Vivian Ducie, present at the discussion, Beauchamp
provoked the lash; for, in the first place, a beautiful woman's apparent
favourite should be particularly discreet in all that he says: and next,
he should have known that the Gallic shrug over matters political is
volcanic--it is the heaving of the mountain, and, like the proverbial
Russ, leaps up Tartarly at a scratch. Our newspapers also had been
flea-biting M. Livret and his countrymen of late; and, to conclude,
over in old England you may fly out against what you will, and there is
little beyond a motherly smile, a nurse's rebuke, or a fool's rudeness
to answer you. In quick-blooded France you have whip for whip, sneer,
sarcasm, claw, fang, tussle, in a trice; and if you choose to comport
yourself according to your insular notion of freedom, you are bound to
march out to the measured ground at an invitation. To begin by saying
that your principles are opposed to it, naturally excites a malicious
propensity to try your temper.

A further cause, unknown to Mr. Ducie, of M. Livret's irritation was,
that Beauchamp had vexed him on a subject peculi