The Lion

In the town of Belfort I take a chair and I sit down in the street. We
talk in a cant phrase of the Man in the Street, but the Frenchman is the
man in the street. Things quite central for him are connected with these
lamp-posts and pavements; everything from his meals to his martyrdoms.
When first an Englishman looks at a French town or village his
first feeling is simply that it is uglier than an English town
or village; when he looks again he sees that this comparative
absence of the picturesque is chiefly expressed in the plain,
precipitous frontage of the houses standing up hard and flat
out of the street like the cardboard houses in a pantomime--
a hard angularity allied perhaps to the harshness of French logic.
When he looks a third time he sees quite simply that it is all because
the houses have no front gardens. The vague English spirit loves to have
the entrance to its house softened by bushes and broken by steps.
It likes to have a little anteroom of hedges half in the house
and half out of it; a green room in a double sense. The Frenchman
desires no such little pathetic ramparts or halting places, for the
street itself is a thing natural and familiar to him.

. . . . .

The French have no front gardens; but the street is every man's
front garden. There are trees in the street, and sometimes fountains.
The street is the Frenchman's tavern, for he drinks in the street.
It is his dining-room, for he dines in the street. It is his
British Museum, for the statues and monuments in French streets are not,
as with us, of the worst, but of the best, art of the country,
and they are often actually as historical as the Pyramids.
The street again is the Frenchman's Parliament, for France has
never taken its Chamber of Deputies so seriously as we take our House
of Commons, and the quibbles of mere elected nonentities in an official
room seem feeble to a people whose fathers have heard the voice
of Desmoulins like a trumpet under open heaven, or Victor Hugo
shouting from his carriage amid the wreck of the second Republic.
And as the Frenchman drinks in the street and dines in the street
so also he fights in the street and dies in the street, so that
the street can never be commonplace to him.

Take, for instance, such a simple object as a lamp-post. In London
a lamp-post is a comic thing. We think of the intoxicated
gentleman embracing it, and recalling ancient friendship.
But in Paris a lamp-post is a tragic thing. For we think
of tyrants hanged on it, and of an end of the world. There is,
or was, a bitter Republican paper in Paris called LA LANTERNE.
How funny it would be if there were a Progressive paper in England
called THE LAMP POST! We have said, then, that the Frenchman is the man