It has always been a question with me, which of two French friends is the more wonderful English scholar--M. Jusserand or André Chevrillon, Taine's nephew and literary executor, and himself one of the leaders of French letters; with whom, as with M. Jusserand, I may reckon now some thirty years of friendship. No one could say that M. Jusserand speaks our tongue exactly like an Englishman. He does much better. He uses it--always, of course, with perfect correctness and fluency--to express French ideas and French wits, in a way as nearly French as the foreign language will permit. The result is extraordinarily stimulating to our English wits. The slight differences both in accent and in phrase keep the ear attentive and alive. New shades emerge; old _clichés_ are broken up. M. Chevrillon has much less accent, and his talk is more flowingly and convincingly English; for which, no doubt, a boyhood partly spent in England accounts. While for vivacity and ease there is little or nothing to choose. But to these two distinguished and accomplished men England and America owe a real debt of gratitude. They have not by any means always approved of _our_ national behavior. M. Jusserand during his official career in Egypt was, I believe, a very candid critic of British administration and British methods, and in the days of our early acquaintance with him I can remember many an amusing and caustic sally of his at the expense of our politicians and our foreign policy. [Illustration: JEAN JULES JUSSERAND] M. Chevrillon took the Boer side in the South African war, and took it with passion. All the same, the friendship of both the diplomat and the man of letters for this country, based upon their knowledge of her, and warmly returned to them by many English friends, has been a real factor in the growth of that broad-based sympathy which we now call the Entente. M. Chevrillon's knowledge of us is really uncanny. He knows more than we know ourselves. And his last book about us--_L'Angleterre et la Guerre_--is not only photographically close to the facts, but full of a spiritual sympathy which is very moving to an English reader. Men of such high gifts are not easily multiplied in any country. But, looking to the future of Europe, the more that France and England--and America--can cultivate in their citizens some degree, at any rate, of that intimate understanding of a foreign nation which shines so conspicuously in the work of these two Frenchmen the safer will that future be. CHAPTER V AMALFI AND ROME. HAMPDEN AND _MARCELLA_ It was in November, 1891, that I finished _David Grieve_, after a long wrestle of more than three years. I was tired out, and we fled south for rest to Rome, Naples, Amalfi, and Ravello. The Cappucini Hotel at Amalfi, Madame Palumbo's inn at Ravello, remain with me as places of pure delight, shone on even in winter by a more than earthly sun.