There would be nothing very extraordinary in such a proceeding, of course. The young Czar of all the Russias and the worthy President of the Republic had given each other the kiss of brotherhood in public; Monsieur Felix Faure had returned the visit which the young Sovereign had paid him; and there had been signed at St. Petersburg that gigantic joke, that Titanic hoax which is called the Franco-Russian alliance, an alliance between the Phrygian cap and the Cossack cap, between the sons of the great Revolution and the scourgers of women, an alliance by the terms of which the blind Gallic cook undertook to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the wily bear of the Caucasians, and gave to the rest of Europe a grotesque and amusing spectacle. The French _badaud_ rarely misses an opportunity of making France the laughing-stock of the whole world. It is much to be regretted that the French do not read the two or three columns that are devoted to them every day by the newspapers of London, New York, and Berlin. Their follies supply these great dailies with more material for comment than they can hope to get out of all that goes on in their respective countries, and that, I say it to their credit and to be just, without bitterness, without prejudice, for France counts among her sincerest friends and admirers, in England and America, all that is most intelligent and enlightened in these two countries of light and leading. It is a cosmopolitan traveller, French-born and still French at heart, who ventures to speak thus in parenthesis. Alexis de Tocqueville might have written in the year of grace 1899 the following lines, which were penned by him in 1849: "France, the most brilliant and most dangerous nation of Europe, is destined ever to be, in turn, an object of admiration, of hatred, of terror and of pity, but of indifference, never." VIII THE HOUSE-WARMING