ere the social arts are carried to perfection--above all, the
art of conversation: every one talks much and talks well. In this
multiplicity of words it must happen of course that a certain quantum
of ideas is intermixed: and somehow or other, by dint of listening,
talking, and looking about them, people _do_ learn, and information to
a certain point is general. Those who have knowledge are not shy of
imparting it, and those who are ignorant take care not to seem so; but
are sometimes agreeable, often amusing, and seldom _betes_. Nowhere
have I seen unformed sheepish boys, nowhere the surliness,
awkwardness, ungraciousness, and uneasy proud bashfulness, I have seen
in the best companies in England. Our French friend Lucien has, at
fifteen, the air and conversation of a finished gentleman; and our
English friend C---- is at eighteen, the veriest log of a lumpish
school-boy that ever entered a room. What I have seen of society, I
like: the delicious climate too, the rich skies, the clear elastic
atmosphere, the _out of doors_ life the people lead, are all (in
summer at least) delightful. There may be less _comfort_ here; but
nobody feels the want of it; and there is certainly more
amusement--and amusement is here truly "le supreme bonheur."
Happiness, according to the French meaning of the word, lies more on
the surface of life: it is a sort of happiness which is cheap and ever
at hand. This is the place to live in for the merry poor man, or the
melancholy rich one: for those who have too much money, and those who
have too little; for those who only wish, like the Irishman "to live
all the days of their life,"--_prendre en legere monnaie la somme des
plaisirs_: but to the thinking, the feeling, the domestic man, who
only exists, enjoys, suffers through his affections--

"Who is retired as noontide dew,
Or fountain in a noonday grove--"

to such a one, Paris must be nothing better than a vast frippery shop,
an ever-varying galantee show, an eternal vanity fair, a vortex of
folly, a pandemonium of vice.

_September 18._--Our imperials are packed, our passports signed, and
we set off to-morrow for Geneva by Dijon and the Jura. I leave nothing
behind me to regret, I see nothing before me to fear, and have no hope
but in change; and now all that remains to be said of Paris, and all
its wonders and all its vanities, all its glories and all its
gaieties, are they not recorded in the ponderous chronicles of most
verac