have been accustomed to consider the French as a
restless, capricious, volatile people, and so I suppose they might have
been formerly, but now they are undoubtedly the reverse, being a quiet
routine plodding sort of people, particularly as regards the
provincials; and even amongst the Parisians there are thousands that
reside in one quarter of the city, which they seldom quit, never
approaching what they consider the gay portion of Paris, but live
amongst each other, visiting only within their own circle, consisting
almost entirely of their relations and family connexions. This feeling
is certainly exemplified still farther at Boulogne, as I knew an old
couple who lived in the upper town, which joins the lower town except by
the separation of the wall of the fortifications, and had not been in
the latter for five years, because they considered it was too bustling
and too much a place of pleasure for such quiet, homely, and orderly
folk as they professed to be and certainly were, in every sense of the
word. At Bordeaux I knew three old ladies who were born in that city,
and never had been in any other town during their whole lives, nor ever
desired to pass the walls of their native place. Many persons who have
been accustomed to spend their days in the provinces have a sort of
horror of Paris; I remember an old gentleman at Rouen, who with his
antiquated spouse lived a sort of Darby and Joan kind of life, their
only daughter being married and living elsewhere; and on my once asking
him if he had ever been to Paris, he replied that he was once so
situated as to be compelled to go upon urgent business that rendered his
presence indispensable, but that he saw very little of the place,
because he had always heard that it was a city replete with vice and
dissipation, and that during the few days his affairs compelled him to
stay he kept close to his apartment, only quitting it to proceed to the
house wherein he had to transact business, and then he went in a
_fiacre_, as, if he had walked perhaps he might have been jostled, run
over, robbed, or something unpleasant might have occurred. "Ah! that's
very true, you did quite right, and acted very prudently, my dear,"
observed his wife, "and nobody knows the anxiety I felt till you came
back again." Although the rising generation of the French is not quite
so dormant in their ideas as that which is passing, yet there is not
even with them the same spirit of travel and enterprise