Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/328

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senses, while the song of birds makes perpetual music for the weary convalescents. Dr. Franck Brentano showed me the trim rose-beds with the proud intimation that it was M. Pinard who reared them exclusively for his invalids. From time to time he gathers them, and places a rose, moist with its early dew, beside a patient, bringing her, with such delicacy, the assurance that she is, for him, something more than a public patient. Not so were cherished unfortunate women under the ancien régime. We laugh at the official legend bequeathed France by the Revolution, and, of a surety, we are not justified in that laughter. If liberty, equality, and fraternity are not all that they might be in France to-day, there has been made a considerable step towards their accomplishment which the conscientious observer is forced to recognise. If brotherhood is still in a nebulous state, the same cannot be said of equality. Where, in London, will you find the head of a large hospital cultivating roses and gathering them at sunrise to carry a breath of delight to a worn-out woman of the people? Such a division and infrangible distance as exist between classes in England are here no longer known. The people are the better for it, and certainly society is not the worse. If republican independence has done nothing else for France, it deserves national gratitude for having abolished what flourishes so desperately in England,—the