as caused me to choose the spot where
even the corners speak of a secular past, there to evoke some
representatives of the most modern, as well as the most arbitrary and the
most momentary, life. You, who know better than any one the motley world
of cosmopolites, understand why I have confined myself to painting here
only a fragment of it. That world, indeed, does not exist, it can have
neither defined customs nor a general character. It is composed of
exceptions and of singularities. We are so naturally creatures of custom,
our continual mobility has such a need of gravitating around one fixed
axis, that motives of a personal order alone can determine us upon an
habitual and voluntary exile from our native land. It is so, now in the
case of an artist, a person seeking for instruction and change; now in
the case of a business man who desires to escape the consequences of some
scandalous error; now in the case of a man of pleasure in search of new
adventures; in the case of another, who cherishes prejudices from birth,
it is the longing to find the "happy mean;" in the case of another,
flight from distasteful memories. The life of the cosmopolite can conceal
all beneath the vulgarity of its whims, from snobbery in quest of higher
connections to swindling in quest of easier prey, submitting to the
brilliant frivolities of the sport, the sombre intrigues of policy, or
the sadness of a life which has been a failure. Such a variety of causes
renders at once very attractive and almost impracticable the task of the
author who takes as a model that ever-changing society so like unto
itself in the exterior rites and fashions, so really, so intimately
complex and composite in its fundamental elements. The writer is
compelled to take from it a series of leading facts, as I have done,
essaying to deduce a law which governs them. That law, in the present
instance, is the permanence of race. Contradictory as may appear this
result, the more one studies the cosmopolites, the more one ascertains
that the most irreducible idea within them is that special strength of
heredity which slumbers beneath the monotonous uniform of superficial
relations, ready to reawaken as soon as love stirs the depths of the
temperament. But there again a difficulty, almost insurmountable, is met
with. Obliged to concentrate his action to a limited number of
personages, the novelist can not pretend to incarnate in them the
confused whole of characters which the