is astonishing how the crust of selfishness gathers over
the heart in Paris; the habit of living with an exclusive view to
personal enjoyment, where the arrangements of life are so favorable,
becomes at last engrossing; and a soulless machine, with no instincts
but those of self-gratification, is often the result, especially if no
ties of kindred mitigate the hardihood of epicurism.

We soon learn to echo Rochefoucauld's words as he entered Mazarin's
carriage,--'everything happens in France;' and, like Goethe, cast
ourselves on the waves of accident with a more than Quixotic
presage,--if not of actual adventure, at least of adventurous
observation; for it is a realm where Fashion, the capricious tyrant of
modern civilization, has her birth, where the '_vielle femme remplissait
une mission importante et tutelaire pour tous les ages_;' where the
_raconteur_ exists not less in society than in literature; the elysium
of the scholar, the nucleus of opinion, the arena of pleasure, and the
head-quarters of experiment, scientific, political, artistic, and
social.

Imagine a disciplined mind alive to the lessons of the past and yet with
sympathy for casual impressions, free, intent and reflective,--and Paris
becomes a museum of the world. Such a visitor wanders about the French
capital with the zest of a philosopher; he warms at the frequent
spectacle of enjoyable old age, notwithstanding the hecatombs left at
Moscow and Waterloo, Sebastopol and Magenta; he reads on the dome of the
Invalides the names of a hundred battle-fields; muses on the proximity
of the lofty and time-stained Cathedral, and the little book-stall,
where poor students linger in the sun; detects a government spy in the
loquacious son of Crispin who acts as porter at his lodgings; pulls the
_cordon bleu_ at a dear author's oaken door on the _quatrieme etage_ in
a social mood, and recalls Wellington's marquee on the Boulevard
Italien, in the midst of the gay throng; notes the dexterity of a
peripatetic shoeblack at his work; loves to sup in one of the
restaurants of the Palais Royal, because there Dr. Franklin was
entertained by the Duke of Orleans; remembers, at the church of St.
Genevieve, that Abelard once lectured on its site; and, gazing on the
beautiful ware in one of the cabinets of the Louvre, muses of the holy
patience of Palissy. By the handsome quays and bridges of the Seine, he
tries to realize that once only an islet covered with mud hovels met the