Page:Works of Heinrich Heine 07.djvu/197

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FRENCH AFFAIRS.
177

deserves the most honourable mention. But the whole royal family has behaved quite as nobly in this sad time. When the cholera broke out, the Queen assembled her friends and servants, and distributed among them flannel bandages, which were mostly made by her own hands. The manners and customs of ancient chivalry are not yet extinct; they have only changed into domestic citizen-like forms: great ladies now bedeck their champions with less poetical, but more practical and healthier scarfs. We live no longer in the ancient days of helm and harness and of warring knights, but in the peaceful, honest bourgeois days of under-jackets and warm bandages; that is, no longer in the iron age, but that of flannel—flannel everywhere. It is, in fact, the best cuirass against the cholera, our most cruel enemy. Venus, according to the Figaro, would wear to-day a girdle of flannel. I myself am up to my neck in flannel, and consider myself cholera-proof. The King himself wears now a belt of the best bourgeois flannel.

Nor should I forget to mention that he, the citizen-king, during the general suffering, gave a great deal of money to the poor citizens, and showed himself inspired with civic sympathy and noble. And while in the vein (da ich mal im Zuge bin), I will also praise the Archbishop of Paris, who also went to the Hôtel Dieu, after the