The Lion - Page 2

in the street; that he can dine in the street, and die in the street.
And if I ever pass through Paris and find him going to bed in the street,
I shall say that he is still true to the genius of his civilisation.
All that is good and all that is evil in France is alike connected
with this open-air element. French democracy and French indecency
are alike part of the desire to have everything out of doors.
Compared to a café, a public-house is a private house.

. . . . .

There were two reasons why all these fancies should float through
the mind in the streets of this especial town of Belfort.
First of all, it lies close upon the boundary of France and Germany,
and boundaries are the most beautiful things in the world.
To love anything is to love its boundaries; thus children will always
play on the edge of anything. They build castles on the edge
of the sea, and can only be restrained by public proclamation
and private violence from walking on the edge of the grass.
For when we have come to the end of a thing we have come
to the beginning of it.

Hence this town seemed all the more French for being on the very margin
of Germany, and although there were many German touches in the place--
German names, larger pots of beer, and enormous theatrical barmaids
dressed up in outrageous imitation of Alsatian peasants--yet the fixed
French colour seemed all the stronger for these specks of something else.
All day long and all night long troops of dusty, swarthy, scornful little
soldiers went plodding through the streets with an air of stubborn
disgust, for German soldiers look as if they despised you, but French
soldiers as if they despised you and themselves even more than you.
It is a part, I suppose, of the realism of the nation which has made
it good at war and science and other things in which what is necessary
is combined with what is nasty. And the soldiers and the civilians
alike had most of them cropped hair, and that curious kind of head
which to an Englishman looks almost brutal, the kind that we call
a bullet-head. Indeed, we are speaking very appropriately when we call
it a bullet-head, for in intellectual history the heads of Frenchmen
have been bullets--yes, and explosive bullets.

. . . . .

But there was a second reason why in this place one should think
particularly of the open-air politics and the open-air art
of the French. For this town of Belfort is famous for one of
the most typical and powerful of the public monuments of France.
From the café table at which I sit I can see the hill beyond the town
on which hangs the high and flat-faced citadel, pierced with
many windows, and warmed in the evening light. On the steep
hill below it is a huge