Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/43



many ways Warsaw affects the foreigner almost as if it were a French city. French is the auxiliary language of the Poles, the language which among the higher classes all know perfectly—although I met several who had half forgotten it during a twenty years' exile in Siberia the—language which is spoken as fluently as the mother-tongue and even better than the Russians speak it. In aristocratic circles Poles frequently converse with one another in French, a state of things which from the beginning of the century was promoted not only by the continual intellectual intercourse with France, and the emigration thereto, but by the need of being able to meet the Russians on neutral territory so far as language is concerned. As the Poles in addition are now frequently called the Frenchmen of the North or East, and as they themselves believe that they are closely related to the French through their defects, which they themselves characterise as inconstancy and instability, the foreigner is constantly asked if he does not see a great and lamentable similarity between the Poles and the French.

This great similarity is purely imaginary.

The trifling similarity which does exist consists in a cognate capacity for swift enthusiasms and violent revulsions of feeling, a craving for adventures and emotions, and a love of fame and show.

But these points of similarity do not exclude a fundamental difference. The rationalistic, argumentative basis of