The beacon and comfort of his life was England, which all
Europe sees clearly as the one pure aristocracy that remains.
He had, moreover, a mild taste for sport and kept an English
bulldog, and he believed the English to be a race of bulldogs,
of heroic squires, and hearty yeomen vassals, because he read all
this in English Conservative papers, written by exhausted little
Levantine clerks. But his reading was naturally for the most part
in the French Conservative papers (though he knew English well),
and it was in these that he first heard of the horrible Budget.
There he read of the confiscatory revolution planned by the
Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer, the sinister Georges Lloyd.
He also read how chivalrously Prince Arthur Balfour of Burleigh
had defied that demagogue, assisted by Austen the Lord Chamberlain
and the gay and witty Walter Lang. And being a brisk partisan
and a capable journalist, he decided to pay England a special visit
and report to his paper upon the struggle.
He drove for an eternity in an open fly through beautiful woods,
with a letter of introduction in his pocket to one duke, who was
to introduce him to another duke. The endless and numberless avenues
of bewildering pine woods gave him a queer feeling that he was driving
through the countless corridors of a dream. Yet the vast silence
and freshness healed his irritation at modern ugliness and unrest.
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