“The results of war,” said he, “are quite incalculable. My good friend William Harrison writes to me that French scholarship has been despised in England since 1871, and that at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin it is the fashion to ignore Maurice Raynouard’s text-book of archæology, though it would be more helpful to their students than any other similar work. But they refuse to learn from the vanquished. And in order that they may feel confidence in a professor when he speaks on the characteristics of the art of Ægina or on the origins of Greek pottery, it is considered necessary that he should belong to a nation which excels in the casting of cannon. Because Marshal Mac-Mahon was beaten in 1870 at Sedan and General Chanzy lost his army at the Maine in the same year, my colleague Maurice Raynouard is banished from Oxford in 1897. Such are the results of military inferiority, slow-moving and illogical, yet sure in their effects. And it is, alas, only too true that the fate of the Muses is settled by a sword-thrust.” “My dear sir,” said Aspertini, “I am going to answer you with all the frankness permissible in a friend. Let us first grant that French thought circulates freely through the world, as it has always done. And although the archæological manual of your learned countryman Maurice Raynouard may not have found a place on the desks of the English Universities, yet your plays are acted in all the theatres of the world; the novels of Alphonse Daudet and of Émile Zola are translated into every language; the canvases of your painters adorn the galleries of two worlds; the achievements of your scientists win renown in every quarter of the globe. And if your soul no longer thrills the soul of the nations, if your voice no longer quickens the heart-beats of mankind, it is because you no longer choose to play the part of apostles of brotherhood and justice, it is because you no longer utter the holy words that bring strength and consolation; it is because France is no longer the lover of the human race, the comrade of the nations; it is because she no longer opens her hands to fling broadcast those seeds of liberty which once she scattered in such generous and sovereign fashion that for long years it seemed that every beautiful human idea was a French idea; it is because she is no longer the France of the philosophers and of the Revolution: in the garrets round the Panthéon and the Luxembourg there are no longer to be found young leaders, writing on deal tables night after night, with all the fire of youth, those pages which make the nations tremble and the despots grow pale with fear. Do not then complain that the glory which you cannot view without misgivings has passed away.