on. We will only allude to one objection which the
fastidious Englishman will be sure to raise: if you live under the same
roof with one or more families he will say, you must necessarily be
acquainted with all the members of the same: you must, in fact, know
what they are going to have for dinner, and thus must be acquainted with
all the secrets of their household economy. Well, so one would
undoubtedly expect to be the case: unfortunately, however, for the
theory, the practical working of the thing is just the contrary: we do
not know of any town where so much isolation is kept up as in Paris,
though there men crowd together under the same roof like bees into the
common hive. We have lived ourselves, between the epochs of our bachelor
or embryo state, and that of our full-blown paternal maturity, on every
floor of a Parisian house, from the _entresol_ just over the stable,
where we could lean out of our window of a morning, smoke our hookah,
and talk to the "Jockey Anglais" who used to rub down our bit of blood,
up to the _Septieme_, where in those celestial regions we could walk
about upon our little terrace, look over the gardens of the Tuileries,
('twas in the Rue de Rivoli, gentle reader!) all the way to St Cloud and
Meudon, one of the sweetest and gayest prospects in the world, by the
by, and hold soft communings either with the stars or our next
neighbours--(but thereon hangs a tale!) and yet never did we know the
name even of any other soul in the house, nor they ours. Oh! we have had
many an adventure up and down that interminable staircase, when we used
to skip up two hundred and twenty steps to get to our eyry; many a
blow-up with our old porter: she was a good soul, too, was old Madame
Nicaise; many a time have we seen flounces and redingotes coming in and
out of doors as we went up or down; but actually we cannot call to mind
the reality, the living vision of a single individual in that vasty
mansion. On the contrary, we used to think them all a set of unsociable
toads, and, in our days of raw Anglicism, we used to think that we might
be just as well called in to "assist" at some of the charming soirees
which we used to hear of from the porter: we did not then know that a
Parisian likes to be "chez lui" as he calls it, quite as much as an
Englishman. We should have lived on in that house, gentle reader, _ad
infinitum_; but one day on going up-stairs, we saw in ominous letters,
on a new brass plate, "au trois