When in the country, especially during the hunting season, M. de
Terremondre’s proclivities were anti-Jewish. When in Paris he dined
with rich Jews, whom he tolerated to the extent of inducing them to
buy pictures at a profit to himself. At County Council meetings, with
due consideration to the feelings that were paramount in his county
town, he was a Nationalist and an Anti-Semite. But as there were
no Jews in that town the anti-Jewish crusade consisted principally
in attacks upon the Protestants, who formed a small, austere, and
exclusive community of their own.
“So we are enemies,” went on M. de Terremondre. “I am sorry for that,
because you are a clever man, but you live quite outside the social
movement, and are not mixed up in public life. If you did as I do, and
entered into it, your sympathies would be anti-Jewish.”
“You flatter me,” said M. Bergeret. “The Jewish race which peopled
Chaldea, Assyria, and Phœnicia in former times, and which founded
cities all along the Mediterranean coast, is composed to-day of Jews
scattered the world over, and also of the countless Arab populations
of Asia and Africa. My heart is not great enough to contain so many
hatreds. Old Cadmus was a Jew, but I really couldn’t be the enemy of
old Cadmus!”
“You are joking,” replied M. de Terremondre, holding in his horse,
who was nibbling at the bushes. “You know as well as I do that the
anti-Jewish movement is directed solely against the Jews who have
settled in France.”
“Therefore I must hate 80,000 persons,” said M. Bergeret. “That is
still too many; I have not the strength for it!”
“No one asks you to hate them,” said M. de Terremondre. “But Jews and
Frenchmen cannot live together. The antagonism is ineradicable, it is
in the blood.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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