ere
elected nonentities in an official room seem feeble to a people whose
fathers have heard the voice of Desmoulins like a trumpet under open
heaven, or Victor Hugo shouting from his carriage amid the wreck of the
second Republic. And as the Frenchman drinks in the street and dines in
the street so also he fights in the street and dies in the street, so
that the street can never be commonplace to him.

Take, for instance, such a simple object as a lamp-post. In London
a lamp-post is a comic thing. We think of the intoxicated gentleman
embracing it, and recalling ancient friendship. But in Paris a lamp-post
is a tragic thing. For we think of tyrants hanged on it, and of an
end of the world. There is, or was, a bitter Republican paper in Paris
called LA LANTERNE. How funny it would be if there were a Progressive
paper in England called THE LAMP POST! We have said, then, that the
Frenchman is the man in the street; that he can dine in the street, and
die in the street. And if I ever pass through Paris and find him going
to bed in the street, I shall say that he is still true to the genius
of his civilisation. All that is good and all that is evil in France is
alike connected with this open-air element. French democracy and French
indecency are alike part of the desire to have everything out of doors.
Compared to a cafe, a public-house is a private house.

.....

There were two reasons why all these fancies should float through the
mind in the streets of this especial town of Belfort. First of all, it
lies close upon the boundary of France and Germany, and boundaries are
the most beautiful things in the world. To love anything is to love its
boundaries; thus children will always play on the edge of anything.
They build castles on the edge of the sea, and can only be restrained by
public proclamation and private violence from walking on the edge of the
grass. For when we have come to the end of a thing we have come to the
beginning of it.

Hence this town seemed all the more French for being on the very
margin of Germany, and although there were many German touches in
the place--German names, larger pots of beer, and enormous theatrical
barmaids dressed up in outrageous imitation of Alsatian peasants--yet
the fixed French colour seemed all the stronger for these specks
of something else. All day long and all night long troops of dusty,
swarthy, scornful little soldiers went plodding through the streets with
an air of s