“Don’t make out that I speak like an utter dolt. Nothing is perfect, but all things cling together, prop one another up, dovetail with one another. It is just like père Mulot’s wall which you can see from here behind the orangery. It is all warped and cracked and leans forward. For the last thirty years that fool of a Quatrebarbe, the diocesan architect, has been stopping dead in front of Mulot’s house. Then, with his nose in air, his hands behind his back and his legs apart, he says: ‘I really don’t see how that holds together!’ The little imps coming out from school stand behind him and shout in mockery of his gruff tones: ‘I really don’t see how that holds together!’ He turns round and, seeing nobody, looks at the pavement as though the echo of his voice had risen from the earth. Then he goes away repeating, ‘I really don’t see how that holds together!’ It holds together because nobody touches it; because père Mulot summons neither masons nor architects; above all, because he takes good care not to ask M. Quatrebarbe for his advice. It holds together because up till now it has held together. It holds together, you old dreamer, because they neither revise the taxes nor reform the Constitution.” “That is to say, it holds together through fraud and iniquity,” said Georges Frémont. “We have fallen into a cauldron of shame. Our finance ministers are under the thumb of the cosmopolitan banking-houses. And, sadder still, it is France—France, of old the deliverer of the nations—that has no care in European politics save to avenge the rights of titled sovereigns. Without even daring to shudder, we permitted the massacre of three hundred thousand Christians in the East, although, by our traditions, we had been constituted their revered and august protectors. We have betrayed not only the interests of humanity, but our own; and now you may see the Republic floating in Cretan waters among the Powers of Europe, like a guinea-fowl amid a flock of gulls. It was to this point, then, that our friendship with our ally was to lead us.” The _préfet_ protested: “Don’t attack the Russian entente, Frémont. It’s the very best of all the electioneering baits.” “The Russian alliance,” replied Frémont, waving his fork, “I hailed the birth of it with joyful expectation. But, alas, did it not, at the very first test, fling us into the arms of that assassin the Sultan and lead us to Crete, there to hurl melinite shell at Christians whose only fault was the long oppression they had suffered? But it was not Russia that we took such pains to humour, it was the great bankers interested in Ottoman bonds. And you saw how the glorious victory of Canea was hailed by the Jewish financiers with a burst of generous enthusiasm.” “There you go,” cried the _préfet_, “that’s just sentimental politics! You ought to know, at any rate, where that sort of thing leads. And why the deuce you should be excited about the Greeks, I don’t see. They’re not at all interesting.”