Published: The Englishman, 3 February 1886.

Attribution: In Scrapbook 1 (28/1, p. 57).

Text: The Englishman.

Notes: This is the first of four comic articles in Frenchified English that RK published in India (see ‘Les Miserables’, CMG, 28 August 1886; ‘Le Roi en Exil’, CMG, 15 November 1888; and ‘An Interesting Condition’, Pioneer, 20 December 1888). RK explained their genesis in ‘Souvenirs of France’: ‘At that time –’83 to ‘88 – the French Press was not nationally enamoured of England. I answered some of their criticisms by what I conceived to be parodies of Victor Hugo's more extravagant prose. The peace of Europe, however, was not seriously endangered by these exercises.’ They do not, in fact, have anything to do with ‘French criticisms’ but have a local reference.

The topic here is the financial measures of the Indian government, measures that RK also satirised at this time in ‘The Rupaiyat of Omar Kal'vin’, CMG, 30 January 1886, when, as the heading to that poem puts it, ‘Government struck from our incomes two per cent’ (Departmental Ditties).

Sir Auckland Colvin, the finance minister responsible for the new measures, sent a note to RK complimenting him on the ‘wit and delicate humour’ of ‘The Rupaiyat of Omar Kal'vin’, but included a reply to the criticisms expressed in RK's poem with a poem of his own called ‘Proverbs of Sillyman’ (Pioneer, 5 February 1886) in the form of ‘a parody of Solomon's proverbs’. RK then ‘rushed a Victor Hugo skit into a Calcutta paper in revenge’ – that is, ‘The History of a Crime’ (Letters, i, 120). The epithets for the three ‘Sirs’ – ‘huge’, ‘ascetic’ and ‘taciturn’ – are meant to be wildly inappropriate.

The Englishman was a Calcutta paper to which RK contributed a few poems as well as this skit. ‘The History of a Crime’ has been reprinted in the Martindell– Ballard pamphlets, in The Victorian, July 1939,1 and in Harbord, ii, 1054–6.

“Et la dèche eternelle regne de nouveau!” It was Sir Colvin who spoke. He who reads the classics of la belle France and above all Sara Barnum.

He is a great man. Oui. Can he understand Finance? No – a thousand times.

He has drawn pictures of ballet girls. No man who draws pictures of ballet girls understands Finance. One does not reconcile the Incompatibles.