walk through six miles of grocers' shops and
public-houses in the faubourgs, in the sole hope of finding a real
turnip-field. The father of a family begins the practical education of
his son by showing him wheat which has not taken the form of a loaf,
and cabbage "in its wild state." Heaven only knows the encounters, the
discoveries, the adventures that are met with! What Parisian has not had
his Odyssey in an excursion through the suburbs, and would not be able
to write a companion to the famous Travels by Land and by Sea from Paris
to St. Cloud?

We do not now speak of that floating population from all parts, for whom
our French Babylon is the caravansary of Europe: a phalanx of thinkers,
artists, men of business, and travellers, who, like Homer's hero, have
arrived in their intellectual country after beholding "many peoples and
cities;" but of the settled Parisian, who keeps his appointed place, and
lives on his own floor like the oyster on his rock, a curious vestige of
the credulity, the slowness, and the simplicity of bygone ages.

For one of the singularities of Paris is, that it unites twenty
populations completely different in character and manners. By the
side of the gypsies of commerce and of art, who wander through all the
several stages of fortune or fancy, live a quiet race of people with an
independence, or with regular work, whose existence resembles the dial
of a clock, on which the same hand points by turns to the same hours. If
no other city can show more brilliant and more stirring forms of life,
no other contains more obscure and more tranquil ones. Great cities are
like the sea: storms agitate only the surface; if you go to the bottom,
you find a region inaccessible to the tumult and the noise.

For my part, I have settled on the verge of this region, but do not
actually live in it. I am removed from the turmoil of the world, and
live in the shelter of solitude, but without being able to disconnect
my thoughts from the struggle going on. I follow at a distance all its
events of happiness or grief; I join the feasts and the funerals; for
how can he who looks on, and knows what passes, do other than take part?
Ignorance alone can keep us strangers to the life around us: selfishness
itself will not suffice for that.

These reflections I made to myself in my attic, in the intervals of the
various household works to which a bachelor is forced when he has
no other servant than his own ready will. Whil