“Yes,” said Martin. “I can understand in a way. But I have no little corner of a country that I can call my own. I’m not the son of any soil.” “Périgord is very fruitful and motherly. She will adopt you,” laughed Bigourdin. “But I am English of the English,” replied Martin. “Périgord would only adopt a Frenchman.” “I have heard it said and I believe it to be true,” said Bigourdin, “that every English artist has two countries, his own and France. And it is the artist who expresses the national feeling and not the university professors and philosophers; and all true men have in them something of the artistic, something which responds to the artistic appeal—I don’t know if I make myself clear, Monsieur Martin—but you must confess that all the outside inspiration you get in England in your art and your literature is Latin. I say ‘outside,’ for naturally you draw from your own noble wells; but for nearly a generation the _fin esprit anglais_, in all its delicacy and all its subtlety and all its humanity is in every way sympathetic with the _fin esprit français_. Is not that true?” “Now I come to think of it,” said Martin, “I suppose it is. I represent the more or less educated middle-class Englishman, and, so far as I am aware of any influence on my life, everything outside of England that has moved me has been French. As far as I know, Germany has not produced one great work of art or literature during the last forty years.” “_Voilà!_” cried Bigourdin, “how could a pig of a country like that produce works of art? I haven’t been to Berlin. But I have seen photographs of the Allée des Victoires. _Mon cher_, it is terrible. It is sculpture hewn out by orders of the drill sergeant’s cane. _Ah, cochon de pays!_ But you others, you English—at last, after our hundred years of peace, you realise how bound you are to France. You realise—all the noble souls among you—that your language is half Latin, that for a thousand years, even before the Norman conquest, all your culture, all the sympathies of your poetry and your art are Roman—and Greek—_enfin_ are Latin. Your wonderful cathedrals—Gothic—do you get them from Teutonic barbarism? No. You get them from the Comacine masters—the little band of Latin spiritualists on the shores of Lake Como. I am an ignorant man, Monsieur Martin, but I have read a little and I have much time to think and—_voilà_—those are my conclusions. In the great war that will come——” “It can’t come in our time,” said Martin.