There are no worse linguists in Europe than the French. But this may also be because they care so little about learning foreign languages, have so little esteem for them, since, while almost any cultivated Englishman can speak French correctly enough, if often with a pronounced accent, it is rare indeed to find a cultivated Frenchman who can speak English with even tolerable ungrammatical fluency. (Shopkeepers and hotel porters in France of course speak some English, because it is to their financial advantage to do so). Moreover, even a literary knowledge of other languages is rare among the French. When reputable English or Italian authors have occasion to insert a French sentence in a novel, the sentence is usually correct; a French author can seldom so much as quote a foreign phrase correctly. Paul Morand, who, I believe, has spent many years in the Diplomatic Service, and whose brilliant cosmopolitan short stories do reveal interest in the national characteristics of other people, is frequently guilty of solecisms in the foreign phrases he now and then employs. In Henri Béraud’s excellent historical novel, _Le Vitriol-de-Lune_, the principal character is an Italian who is called, throughout the book, ‘Guiseppe,’ though Giuseppe is one of the commonest Italian names. Alone among the contemporary French writers with whose work I am acquainted, André Maurois reveals a genuine knowledge of English. And it is significant that he, too, is practically alone in revealing a genuine sympathetic understanding of the English people. _Les Silences du Colonel Bramble_ occasionally crosses the line into national caricature; but it is at least caricature based on knowledge, not wild unrelated caricature like Abel Hermant’s. As for _Ariel_, a work of far greater importance--well, written by an Italian, it would have been, if surprising, at least credible, since there are many Italians who love and understand Shelley; written by a Frenchman, it appears little short of miraculous. Nor is this solely a personal judgment of my own, employed for the sake of my thesis. English critics fairly gasped with amazement at _Ariel_. But I repeat that André Maurois stands alone. You would have to go back to Taine to find any similarly lonely figure.[2] So, reluctantly, I end, as I began, with those two irreconcilable, but I think equally justified, estimates of the French--save that each has at the moment lost something of its intensity for me through the relief of putting it into written words.