ters of Europe
to renew during peace the delightful habits which they contracted
during the war. They must come to Paris, and when they are there, they
must be regaled at any price. If our funds are in favor, it is due not
so much to the higher interest they pay, as to the instinctive
confidence which foreigners cannot help placing in a people amongst whom
every lover of good living finds so much happiness.

Love of good living is by no means unbecoming in women. It agrees with
the delicacy of their organization, and serves as a compensation for
some pleasures which they are obliged to abstain from, and for some
hardships to which nature seems to have condemned them. There is no more
pleasant sight than a pretty _gourmande_ under arms. Her napkin is
nicely adjusted; one of her hands rests on the table, the other carries
to her mouth little morsels artistically carved, or the wing of a
partridge which must be picked. Her eyes sparkle, her lips are glossy,
her talk is cheerful, all her movements graceful; nor is there lacking
some spice of the coquetry which accompanies all that women do. With so
many advantages, she is irresistible, and Cato the Censor himself could
not help yielding to the influence.

The love of good living is in some sort instinctive in women, because it
is favorable to beauty. It has been proved, by a series of rigorously
exact observations, that by a succulent, delicate, and choice regimen,
the external appearances of age are kept away for a long time. It gives
more brilliancy to the eye, more freshness to the skin, more support to
the muscles; and as it is certain in physiology that wrinkles, those
formidable enemies of beauty, are caused by the depression of muscle, it
is equally true that, other things being equal, those who understand
eating are comparatively four years younger than those ignorant of that
science. Painters and sculptors are deeply impenetrated with this truth;
for in representing those who practice abstinence by choice or duty as
misers or anchorites, they always give them the pallor of disease, the
leanness of misery, and the wrinkles of decrepitude.

Good living is one of the main links of society, by gradually extending
that spirit of conviviality by which different classes are daily brought
closer together and welded into one whole; by animating the
conversation, and rounding off the angles of conventional inequality. To
the same cause we can also ascribe all the efforts a