_that_ is!" Oh we learned, that is we tried to, as hard as ever we
could, and were fairly well at it, I always felt, even by the time we
had passed up into that comparatively short but wider and finer vista of
the Rue de Tournon, which in those days more abruptly crowned the more
compressed approach and served in a manner as a great outer vestibule to
the Palace. Style, dimly described, looked down there, as with conscious
encouragement, from the high grey-headed, clear-faced, straight-standing
old houses--very much as if wishing to say "Yes, small staring jeune
homme, we are dignity and memory and measure, we are conscience and
proportion and taste, not to mention strong sense too: for all of which
good things take us--you won't find one of them when you find (as you're
going soon to begin to at such a rate) vulgarity." This, I admit, was an
abundance of remark to such young ears; but it did all, I maintain,
tremble in the air, with the sense that the Rue de Tournon, cobbled and
a little grass-grown, might more or less have figured some fine old
street _de province_: I cherished in short its very name and think I
really hadn't to wait to prefer the then, the unmenaced, the inviolate
Cafe Foyot of the left hand corner, the much-loved and so haunted Cafe
Foyot of the old Paris, to its--well, to its roaring successor. The wide
mouth of the present Boulevard Saint-Michel, a short way round the
corner, had not yet been forced open to the exhibition of more or less
glittering fangs; old Paris still pressed round the Palace and its
gardens, which formed the right, the sober social antithesis to the
"elegant" Tuileries, and which in fine, with these renewals of our young
confidence, reinforced both in a general and in a particular way one of
the fondest of our literary curiosities of that time, the conscientious
study of Les Francais Peints par Eux-Memes, rich in wood-cuts of
Gavarni, of Grandville, of Henri-Monnier, which we held it rather our
duty to admire and W. J. even a little his opportunity to copy in
pen-and-ink. This gilt-edged and double-columned octavo it was that
first disclosed to me, forestalling a better ground of acquaintance, the
great name of Balzac, who, in common with every other "light" writer of
his day, contributed to its pages: hadn't I pored over his exposition
there of the contrasted types of L'Habituee des Tuileries and L'Habituee
du Luxembourg?--finding it very _serre_, in fact what I didn't then kn