What about this _otherwise_, I mean this definitive political separation and these centuries of hostility which fill our history text-books? We can speak of it without the slightest uneasiness, not only because all this seems now to be so far in the past, a past which can never revive, but, above all, because of the remarkable characters of this hostility and of its brilliant interludes. I say that this hostility had, on the whole, this remarkable character, to be lofty rivalry, not low hatred. It may have been—it was indeed at times—fierce and passionate, but it was all along accompanied by mutual respect. Our two countries aimed at surpassing much more than at destroying each other. It was more like a world race for glory than a grip for death. Its spirit was quarrelsome animosity taking immense delight in stupid pinpricks and daring strokes, not cold hate dreaming of mortal stabs to the heart. Your great poet Rudyard Kipling has expressed this very finely in the poem he wrote three years ago on the occasion, if I remember well, of your King’s first visit to Paris. Let me quote from this poem: ‘We stormed the seas tack for tack and burst Through the doorways of new worlds, doubtful which was first.’ ‘Ask the wave that has not watched war between us two ... Each the other’s mystery, terror, need, and love.’ ‘O companion, we have lived greatly through all time.’ I could illustrate this spirit by many stories. One of the most typical is about the encounter on the battlefield of Fontenoy, in 1745, of the massive English column and of the French centre. There is in that story a mixture of fine legend and historical truth, but anyway it is illustrative of the spirit. The very fact that the legend could grow out of the truth is a proof of the spirit by itself. There is another story much less known, but which is as much illuminating. It was at the beginning of the American war, thirty-four years after Fontenoy, in 1779. Your famous seaman Rodney was in Paris, which he could not leave on account of certain debts, yet he was perfectly free to walk about as any ordinary private man, though France and England were at war. Concentration camps had not been invented as yet! One day, then, as he was dining with some French military friends—always remember, please, that we were at war—they came to talk of some recent successes we had just had at sea, among them the conquest of Grenada in the West Indies. Rodney expressed himself on these successes with polite disdain, saying that if _he_ was free—he Rodney—the French would not have it so easy! Upon which old Marshal de Biron paid for his debts and said: ‘You are free, sir, the French will not avail themselves of the obstacles which prevent you from fighting them.’ Well, it cost us very dear to have let him go, but was not it fine!