We
are in presence of a field of those fluttering tricolor flags which
fill the eyes of a wanderer over the battle-centres of the Marne with
a passion of tears. We are in presence of the memorials of a chivalry
that did not count the price, but died "joyfully" for France.[1]
[Footnote 1: The poet Leon Guillot, in dying, bid his
comrades describe him to his father and mother as "tombe au
champ d'honneur et mort _joyeusement_ pour son pays."--"Les
Diverses Familles Spirituelles de la France," pp. 178, 179.]
There is not much advantage in searching for the germs of all this
exalted sentiment earlier than the middle of the seventeenth century.
The malady of the Fronde was serious precisely because it revealed the
complete absence, in the nobles, in the clergy, in the common people,
of patriotic conviction of any kind. Cardinal's men and
anti-cardinalists, Mazarin and Monsieur, Conde and Plessis-Praslin,--we
follow the bewildering turns of their fortune and the senseless
evolution of their mercenaries, without being able to trace any moral
line of conduct, any ethical aim on the part of the one or the other.
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