Could he have foreseen the terrific experience through which France was to pass a hundred years from Waterloo, how his tone would have altered into deep commiseration. And yet it is interesting to compare this picture of the years following the Napoleonic wars and the exhaustion which then revealed itself—the utter hopelessness of every one—with the condition to-day when, with the first pale beams of the sun of peace, France is thinking of the future, already discounting the profit that will be obtained by her victorious and long-suffering arms. What great repose has she not merited? What great reward of peace and plenty? This generation has fought, has given its life with unheard-of prodigality that the new generation may not have to fight. It has purchased freedom at the terrible price of blood—freedom from the slavery of Germany. No. De Musset’s picture is no longer true, but it is doubtless this portrait of a puny, bloodless, spiritless France which impressed itself, all the more vividly because of the splendour of the word-painting, upon the foreign observer, and it was perhaps these students of French history who moulded English opinion. De Musset’s powerful description was photographed upon the brain, and few realised that the conditions of which he spoke were transitory, and that France had emerged triumphant from her darkest hour when the pulse of her being was but a thread. The France of to-day is not bowed down with despair, but is buoyed with invincible hope. Hope in the morrow, hope in the recreative genius of her people—of their marvellous powers of recuperation. It is pleasant, it is comforting, to note the contrast, to observe the salutary change the century has brought; the France of De Musset shuddered, demoralised, over the cold embers of conflict—a conflict gigantic as it then seemed, but small in face of the sacrifices of the Great War. Even the agonies of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia cannot compare with the hecatomb, the awful onslaught that Joffre had to meet and defeat. Glory to the "poilu," to his courage and constancy. He has saved France; he has gained for her the sweet and fruitful repose of a century wherein her inventive industry and creative genius may be revived; wherein she may excel in the arts, in the most splendid works of peace; wherein she may prove to be the torch-bearer of advanced civilisation, the pioneer—only a prudent and alert pioneer—no longer the dupe to illusions, of that beatific time when there shall be no more war.