CHAPTER XV.

A SUCCESS AS AN ANGLOPHOBIST. (THE LATE MARQUIS DE BOISSY.)

The Anglophobist of the purest water that France ever produced, was the late Marquis de Boissy, senator of the second Empire. This witty, eloquent, spirited old Gaul, was the soul of the august assembly, the only member of it who was not either stuffed or embalmed, and his memory alone will save it from oblivion. His philippics will long ring in the ears of the French.

Whether he was in the tribune treating the subject of home or foreign politics, or whether he was making a speech at the agricultural committee meeting of his borough, he had but one peroration, his cherished device, his hobby:

_Delenda est Britannia._

He used to accuse England of smothering the human race with her breath, and would compare her to the octopus, that hideous and sticky mass whose tentacles have the property of creating a vacuum around them.

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"The world will never have any peace," said he, "until that brute has ceased sucking the blood of other nations, and been sunk at the bottom of the sea. Old as I am, I would go for a drummer, so that I might lend a helping hand in subduing the nation that has violated the most sacred laws of humanity."

All the scourges that visit the earth were put down by him to the credit of that traitress of a neighbor; earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, inundations, cholera, the plague; even down to his own colds in the head, all were attributed by him to the baneful influence of the breeze that had passed over England.

He did not hesitate to declare that the air of the Champs-Elysees in Paris was polluted by the presence of the English colony in its midst. Every time he passed through it, he fumigated himself as soon as he reached home.

Poor Marquis de Boissy, what would you have said, if you had lived long enough to receive invitations to _five o'clocquer_?

The old Anglophobist was sincere in his epic outbursts, and at the same time very amusing, for he was as full of wit as he was of Anglophobia.

He is dead, leaving no successor; France is at present without a declared Anglophobist.