ained farther on, page 145.--TR.]

[Footnote 2181: Mme. de Genlis, "Memoires," passim. "Dict. des
Etiquettes," I. 348.]

[Footnote 2182: Mme. d'Oberkirk, I. 395.--The Baron and Baroness de
Sotenville in Moliere are people well brought up although provincial and
pedantic.]

CHAPTER II. DRAWING ROOM LIFE.[2201]

I.

Perfect only in France.--Reasons for this derived from the
French character.--Reasons derived from the tone of the
court.--This life becomes more and more agreeable and
absorbing.

Similar circumstances have led other aristocracies in Europe to nearly
similar ways and habits. There also the monarchy has given birth to the
court and the court to a refined society. But the development of this
rare plant has been only partial. The soil was unfavorable and the
seed was not of the right sort. In Spain, the king stands shrouded
in etiquette like a mummy in its wrappings, while a too rigid pride,
incapable of yielding to the amenities of the worldly order of things,
ends in a sentiment of morbidity and in insane display.[2202] In
Italy, under petty despotic sovereigns, and most of them strangers, the
constant state of danger and of hereditary distrust, after having tied
all tongues, turns all hearts towards the secret delights of love and
towards the mute gratification of the fine arts. In Germany and in
England, a cold temperament, dull and rebellious to culture, keeps
man, up to the close of the last century, within the Germanic habits
of solitude, inebriety and brutality. In France, on the contrary,
all things combine to make the social sentiment flourish; in this
the national genius harmonizes with the political regime, the plant
appearing to be selected for the soil beforehand.

The Frenchman loves company through instinct, and the reason is that he
does well and easily whatever society calls upon him to do. He has not
the false shame which renders his northern neighbors awkward, nor the
powerful passions which absorb his neighbors of the south. Talking is
no effort to him, having none of the natural timidity which begets
constraint, and with no constant preoccupation to overcome. He
accordingly converses at his ease, ever on the alert, and conversation
affords him extreme pleasure. For the happiness which he requires is of
a peculiar kind: delicate, light, rapid, incessantly renewed and varied,
in which his intellect, his vanity, all his emotional and sympathetic
facu