Note 1 — Chapter VIII
Reading edition
If my memory serves me, it was one of our wittiest vaudevillists who once laid a wager that he would get an encore, at one of our popular theaters on the Boulevard, for the following patriotic quatrain:
"La lâcheté ne vaut pas la vaillance, Mille revers ne font pas un succès; La France, amis, sera toujours la France, Les Français seront toujours les Français."
He won the bet.
The London badauds are at present nightly applauding, at the Empire Theater, a patriotic song which begins by the following words:
"What though the powers the world doth hold Were all against us met, We have the might they felt of old, And England's England yet."
Is it not strange that music-hall jingoism and chauvinisme should not only be expressed in the same manner, but by the very same words?