Elle était comme chez elle à l’Élysée—Montmartre et au Château-Rouge; elle y connaissait tout le monde, le chef d’orchestre la saluait, ce dont elle était extraordinairement fière, et quantité de gens la tutoyaient. Je l’accompagnais partout, dans les commencements, et bien que je n’étais pas précisément naïve, ni gênée par les scrupules de mon éducation, je fus tellement consternée de l’incroyable désordre de sa vie, que je ne pus m’empêcher de lui en faire quelques représentations. Elle se fâcha tout rouge. Tu fais ce qui te plaît, me dit-elle, laisse-moi faire ce qui me convient. C’est un justice que je lui dois: jamais elle n’essaya sur moi son influence, jamais elle ne m’engagea à suivre son exemple. Ivre de liberté elle respectait la liberté des autres.” Such is the form which Franchise has taken under republican instruction. But of the true Franchise of Charlemagne and Roland, there were, you must note also, two distinct forms. In the last stanzas of the Chant de Roland, Normandy and France have two distinct epithets,—“Normandie, la franche; France, la solue” (soluta). “Frank Normandy; Loose France. Solute;”—we, adding the dis, use the words loose and dissolute only in evil sense. But ‘France la solue’ has an entirely lovely meaning. The frankness of Normandy is the soldier’s virtue; but the unbinding, so to speak, of France, is the peasant’s. “And having seen that lovely maid, Why should I fear to say That she is ruddy, fleet, and strong, And down the rocks can leap along Like rivulets in May?” It is curious that the most beautiful descriptive line in all Horace, “montibus altis Levis crepante lympha desilit pede,” comes in the midst of the dream of the blessed islands which are to be won by following the founders of—what city, think you? The city that first sang the “Marseillaise.” “Juppiter illa piae secrevit litora genti.” Recollect that line, my French readers, if I chance to find any, this month, nor less the description of those ‘arva beata’ as if of your own South France; and then consider also those prophetic lines, true of Paris as of Rome,— “Nec fera coerulea domuit Germania pube. Impia, perdemus devoti sanguinis aetas.” Consider them, I say, and deeply, thinking over the full force of those words, “devoti sanguinis,” and of the ways in which the pure blood of Normandie la franche, and France la solue, has corrupted itself, and become accursed. Had I but time to go into the history of that word ‘devoveo,’ what a piece of philology it would lead us into! But, for another kind of opposition to the sweet Franchise of old time, take this sentence of description of another French maiden, by the same author from whom I have just quoted the sketch of the grisette: