e Chateaubriand. He lived in the real world, and not in a
false dream of some past world that had never been. He saw that the
sporting squires of his party were as much the representatives of
ancestral force and quality as in older days were long lines of
Claudii and Valerii. His conservative doctrine was a profound
instinct, in part political, but in greater part moral. The accidental
roughness of the symbol did not touch him, for the symbol was
glorified by the sincerity of his faith and the compass of his
imagination.

With these ideas strong within him, in 1773 Burke made a journey to
France. It was almost as though the solemn hierophant of some mystic
Egyptian temple should have found himself amid the brilliant chatter
of a band of reckless, keen-tongued disputants of the garden or
the porch at Athens. His only son had just finished a successful
school-course at Westminster, and was now entered a student at Christ
Church. He was still too young for the university, and Burke thought
that a year could not be more profitably spent than in forming his
tongue to foreign languages. The boy was placed at Auxerre, in the
house of the business agent of the Bishop of Auxerre. From the Bishop
he received many kindnesses, to be amply repaid in after years when
the Bishop came in his old age, an exile and a beggar, to England.

While in Paris, Burke did all that he could to instruct himself as
to what was going on in French society. If he had not the dazzling
reception which had greeted Hume in 1764, at least he had ample
opportunities of acquainting himself with the prevailing ideas of the
time in more than one of the social camps into which Paris was then
divided. Madame du Deffand tells the Duchess of Choiseul that though
he speaks French extremely ill, everybody felt that he would be
infinitely agreeable if he could more easily make himself understood.
He followed French well enough as a listener, and went every day to
the courts to hear the barristers and watch the procedure. Madame du
Deffand showed him all possible attention, and her friends eagerly
seconded her. She invited him to supper parties, where he met
the Count de Broglie, the agent of the king's secret diplomacy;
Caraccioli, successor of nimble-witted Galiani, the secretary from
Naples; and other notabilities of the high world. He supped with the
Duchess of Luxembourg, and heard a reading of La Harpe's _Barmecides_.
It was high treason in this circle to frequ