A thinker who was
listening to this conversation, concluded that in a fatherland of some
extent there were often many thousand men who had no fatherland.
You, pleasure loving Parisian, who have never made any great journey
save that to Dieppe to eat fresh fish; who know nothing but your
varnished town house, your pretty country house, and your box at that
Opera where the rest of Europe persists in feeling bored; who speak your
own language agreeably enough because you know no other, you love all
that, and you love further the girls you keep, the champagne which comes
to you from Rheims, the dividends which the Hotel-de-Ville pays you
every six months, and you say you love your fatherland!
In all conscience, does a financier cordially love his fatherland?
The officer and the soldier who will pillage their winter quarters, if
one lets them, have they a very warm love for the peasants they ruin?
Where was the fatherland of the scarred Duc de Guise, was it in Nancy,
Paris, Madrid, Rome?
What fatherland have you, Cardinals de La Balue, Duprat, Lorraine,
Mazarin?
Where was the fatherland of Attila and of a hundred heroes of this type?
I would like someone to tell me which was Abraham's fatherland.
The first man to write that the fatherland is wherever one feels
comfortable was, I believe, Euripides in his "Phaeton." But the first
man who left his birthplace to seek his comfort elsewhere had said it
before him.
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