He sighed with a melancholy and yet with a generous envy. He had too
fine a natural perception not to acknowledge that there is a rank of
mind as well as of birth, and in the first he felt that Lemercier might
well walk before a Rochebriant; but his very humility was a proof that
he underrated himself.

Lemercier did not excel him in mind, but in experience. And just as the
drilled soldier seems a much finer fellow than the raw recruit, because
he knows how to carry himself, but after a year's discipline the
raw recruit may excel in martial air the upright hero whom he now
despairingly admires, and never dreams he can rival; so set a mind from
a village into the drill of a capital, and see it a year after; it may
tower a head higher than its recruiting-sergeant.

CHAPTER VI.

"I believe," said Lemercier, as the coupe rolled through the lively
alleys of the Bois de Boulogne, "that Paris is built on a loadstone,
and that every Frenchman with some iron globules in his blood is
irresistibly attracted towards it. The English never seem to feel for
London the passionate devotion that we feel for Paris. On the contrary,
the London middle class, the commercialists, the shopkeepers, the
clerks, even the superior artisans compelled to do their business in the
capital, seem always scheming and pining to have their home out of it,
though but in a suburb."

"You have been in London, Frederic?"

"Of course; it is the mode to visit that dull and hideous metropolis."

"If it be dull and hideous, no wonder the people who are compelled to do
business in it seek the pleasures of home out of it."

"It is very droll that though the middle class entirely govern the
melancholy Albion, it is the only country in Europe in which the middle
class seem to have no amusements; nay, they legislate against amusement.
They have no leisure-day but Sunday; and on that day they close
all their theatres, even their museums and picture-galleries. What
amusements there may be in England are for the higher classes and the
lowest."

"What are the amusements of the lowest class?"

"Getting drunk."

"Nothing else?"

"Yes. I was taken at night under protection of a policeman to some
cabarets, where I found crowds of that class which is the stratum below
the working class; lads who sweep crossings and hold horses, mendicants,
and, I was told, thieves, girls whom a servant-maid would not speak to,
very merry, dancing quadrilles and waltzes, and