a ball and anteroom; and the gentlemen two
"billiards" and a reading-room, with detached snuggeries for
smoking--_all_ on the _first floor_.

Public places, excepting the above-mentioned "Cercle," exist not at
Vichy, and as nobody thinks of paying visits save only to the doctor and
the springs, "_on s'ennui tres considerablement a Vichy_." If it be
true, that, in some of the lighter annoyances of life, fellowship is
decidedly preferable to solitude, _ennui_ comes not within the
number--every attempt to divide it with one's neighbours only makes it
worse; as Charles Lamb has described the _concert_ of silence at a
Quakers' meeting, the intensity increases with the number, and every new
accession raises the public stock of distress, which again redounds with
a surplus to each individual, "_chacun en a son part, et tous l'ont tout
entier_."[4] What a chorus of yawns is there; and mutual yawns, you
know, are the dialogue of ennui. No wonder; for the physicians don't
permit their patients to read any books but novels. They seek to array
the "Understanding" against him who wrote so well concerning its laws;
Bacon, as _intellectual food_, they consider difficult of digestion; and
even for their own La Place there is no place at Vichy! Every unlucky
headache contracted here, is placed to the account of _thinking_ in the
bath. If Dr P---- suspects any of his patients of thinking, he asks
them, like Mrs Malaprop, "what business they have to think?" "_Vous etes
venu ici pour prendre les eaux, et pour vous desennuyer, non pas pour
penser! Que le Diable emporte la Pensee!_" And so he _does_ accordingly!

How _we_ got through the twenty-four hours of each day, is still a
problem to us; after making due deductions for the time consumed in
eating, drinking, and sleeping. Occasionally we tried to "_beat time_"
by _versifying_ our own and our neighbours' "experiences" of Vichy. But
soon finding the "_quicquid agunt homines_" of those who in fact did
nothing, was beyond our powers of _description_, gave up, as abortive,
the attempt to maintain our "suspended animation" on means so artificial
and precarious. When little is to be told, few words will suffice. If
the word fisherman be derived from _fishing_, and not from _fish_, we
had a great many such fishermen at Vichy; who, though they could neither
scour a worm, nor splice the rod that their clumsiness had broken, nor
dub a fly, nor land a fish of a pound weight, if any such had had the