Daily quote by Jacques Bainville

• When Frenchmen were in good health, when their intelligence was sound and vigorous, the idea of tradition was no less foreign to them than was the idea of revolution. The notion of returning to the chansons de geste and Saint Louis's oak tree would have seemed as ridiculous to them as wearing their fathers' breeches and hats out of filial piety.
  • Jaco et Lori (1927), pp. 200-201, quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 119, n. 76