g a sonata of Steibelt's on the piano, and singing a
ballad; or when he found her writing the French language correctly,
or reading Racine, father and son, and explaining their beauties, or
sketching a landscape, or painting in sepia! What joy to live again in
a flower so pure, so lovely, which had never left the maternal stem;
an angel whose budding graces and whose earliest developments he had
passionately watched; an only daughter, incapable of despising her
father, or of ridiculing his defective education, so truly was she an
ingenuous young girl.

When he first came to Paris, Cesar had known how to read, write, and
cipher, but his education stopped there; his laborious life had kept him
from acquiring ideas and knowledge outside the business of perfumery.
Mixing wholly with people to whom science and letters were of no
importance, and whose information did not go beyond their specialty,
having no time to give to higher studies, the perfumer had become a
merely practical man. He adopted necessarily the language, blunders, and
opinions of the bourgeois of Paris, who admires Moliere, Voltaire, and
Rousseau on faith, and buys their books without ever reading them; who
maintains that people should say _ormoires_, because women put away
their gold and their dresses and moire in those articles of furniture,
and that it is only a corruption of the language to say _armoires_.
Potier, Talma, and Mademoiselle Mars were ten times millionaires, and
did not live like other human beings; the great tragedian ate raw meat,
and Mademoiselle Mars sometimes drank dissolved pearls, in imitation of
a celebrated Egyptian actress. The Emperor had leather pockets in his
waistcoat, so that he could take his snuff by the handful; he rode on
horseback at full gallop up the stairway of the orangery at Versailles.
Writers and artists died in the hospital, as a natural consequence of
their eccentricities; they were, moreover, all atheists, and people
should be very careful not to admit them into their households. Joseph
Lebas cited with horror the history of his step-sister Augustine's
marriage with the painter Sommervieux. Astronomers lived on spiders.

These striking points of information on the French language, on dramatic
art, politics, literature, and science, will explain the bearings of
the bourgeois intellect. A poet passing through the Rue des Lombards
may dream of Araby as he inhales certain perfumes. He may admire the
_danseuses_ in