Page:Works of Heinrich Heine 07.djvu/123

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FRENCH AFFAIRS.
103

therefore unobserved, running about the streets, or to the theatres and receptions (routs—French version, raouts) of London. Their feudal decorations and similar tinsel they reserve for court festivals and old anniversaries. Therefore they are more respected among the people than are our gods on the Continent, who are so readily recognised with all their attributes. One day on Waterloo Bridge in London I heard one boy say to the other, "Have you ever seen a nobleman?" To which the other replied, "No, but I have seen the coach of the Lord Mayor." This said coach is an extravagantly large chest, excessively gilt, painted with fabulous richness of colour, with a red-velveted, stiff-golden, powder-wigged coachman, and three ditto powder-wigged lackeys behind on the box. If the English people quarrel with their nobility, it is not on account of social equality, of which they never think, and least of all about civil freedom, which they fully enjoy, but because of pure questions of money; because the nobility, in possession of all the sinecures, ecclesiastical endowments and offices, which are extravagantly salaried, revel bravely and luxuriously, while the greater part of the people, overloaded with taxes, languish in deepest misery and die of hunger. Therefore a parliamentary reform is required, and those among the nobility who support it have