of
preserving buildings, they have got out of the habit of building them.
And in London one mingles, as it were, one's tears because so few are
pulled down.

.....

As I sat staring at the column of the Bastille, inscribed to Liberty and
Glory, there came out of one corner of the square (which, like so many
such squares, was at once crowded and quiet) a sudden and silent line of
horsemen. Their dress was of a dull blue, plain and prosaic enough,
but the sun set on fire the brass and steel of their helmets; and their
helmets were carved like the helmets of the Romans. I had seen them
by twos and threes often enough before. I had seen plenty of them in
pictures toiling through the snows of Friedland or roaring round
the squares at Waterloo. But now they came file after file, like an
invasion, and something in their numbers, or in the evening light that
lit up their faces and their crests, or something in the reverie into
which they broke, made me inclined to spring to my feet and cry out,
"The French soldiers!" There were the little men with the brown faces
that had so often ridden through the capitals of Europe as coolly as
they now rode through their own. And when I looked across the square I
saw that the two other corners were choked with blue and red; held
by little groups of infantry. The city was garrisoned as against a
revolution.

Of course, I had heard all about the strike, chiefly from a baker. He
said he was not going to "Chomer." I said, "Qu'est-ce que c'est que le
chome?" He said, "Ils ne veulent pas travailler." I said, "Ni moi non
plus," and he thought I was a class-conscious collectivist proletarian.
The whole thing was curious, and the true moral of it one not easy for
us, as a nation, to grasp, because our own faults are so deeply and
dangerously in the other direction. To me, as an Englishman (personally
steeped in the English optimism and the English dislike of severity),
the whole thing seemed a fuss about nothing. It looked like turning out
one of the best armies in Europe against ordinary people walking
about the street. The cavalry charged us once or twice, more or less
harmlessly. But, of course, it is hard to say how far in such criticisms
one is assuming the French populace to be (what it is not) as docile as
the English. But the deeper truth of the matter tingled, so to speak,
through the whole noisy night. This people has a natural faculty for
feeling itself on the eve of something--of th