The next sentence is a curious one. I pray your attention to it. "The
defensive system of the Norman is born of a profound sentiment of
_distrust_ and _cunning, foreign to the character of the Frank_."
You will find in all my previous notices of the French, continual
insistance upon their natural Franchise, and also, if you take the
least pains in analysis of their literature down to this day, that
the idea of falseness is to them indeed more hateful than to any other
European nation. To take a quite cardinal instance. If you compare
Lucian's and Shakespeare's Timon with Molière's Alceste, you
will find the Greek and English misanthropes dwell only on men's
_ingratitude_ to _themselves_, but Alceste, on their _falsehood to
each other_.

Now hear M. le Duc farther:

"The castles built between the tenth and twelfth centuries along the
Loire, Gironde, and Seine, that is to say, along the lines of the
Norman invasions, and in the neighbourhood of their possessions, have
a peculiar and uniform character which one finds neither in central
France, nor in Burgundy, nor can there be any need for us to throw
light on (_faire ressortir_) the superiority of the warrior spirit
of the Normans, during the later times of the Carlovingian epoch,
over the spirit of the chiefs of Frank descent, established on the
Gallo-Roman soil." There's a bit of honesty in a Frenchman for you!

I have just said that they valued religion chiefly for its influence
of order in the present world: being in this, observe, as nearly as
may be the exact reverse of modern believers, or persons who profess
to be such,--of whom it may be generally alleged, too truly, that they