No English traveller
has commented on the French Chamber of Deputies, without expending much
eloquence and a great deal of honest indignation on the practice of
speaking from a tribune, written orations being in their opinion a
ludicrous travestie on the freedom of debate. Now what is the fact; in
the whole French Chamber there are not ten, there are not five men
who could address the house extempore; not from any deficiency
of ability--not from any want of information, logical force, and
fluency---the names of Thiers, Guizot, Lamartine, Dupin, Arago, &c. &c.
are quite sufficient to demonstrate this--but simply from the intricacy
and difficulty of the French language. A worthy alderman gets up, as the
phrase is, and addresses a speech of some three quarters of an hour to
the collective wisdom of the livery; and although he may be frequently
interrupted by thunders of applause, he is never checked for any
solecisms in his grammar: he may drive a coach and six through
Lindley Murray; he may inflict heaven knows how many fractures on poor
Priscian's head, yet to criticise him on so mean a score as that of mere
diction, would not be thought of for a moment. Not so in France:
the language is one of equivoque and subtlety; the misplacement of a
particle, the change of a gender, the employment of any phrase but the
exact one, might be at any moment fatal to the sense of the speaker, and
would inevitably be so to his success. It was not very long since, that
a worthy deputy interrupted M. Thiers by alleging the non-sequitur
of some assertion, “_Vous n'est pas consequent_,” cried the indignant
member, using a phrase not only a vulgarism in itself, but inapplicable
at the time. A roar of laughter followed his interruption. In all the
journals of the next day, he was styled the deputy _consequent_; and
when he returned to his constituency the ridicule attached to his
blunder still traced his steps, and finally lost him his election.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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