ng-down places in which our land abounds.
Drinking in public places in France is not so completely separated from
all respectability and refinement as it is with us. It involves none of
that horrid nomenclature, "slings," "punches," "cocktails," "smashes,"
which carry with them all the terror and awfulness of oaths. The French
have pretty names for drinks, as well as a rather pretty, poetic way of
alluding to a man's inebriation. "He is a little gray;" "He has a little
corner in his head;" "He is in a condition for beating the wall;" "He is
heading pins," etc., etc., are favorite expressions. Of course, the
delicacy or waggishness with which we allude to an evil is no excuse for
it, but the French have little absolute drunkenness to excuse. They are
emphatically a sober people (being a good deal like intoxicated Yankees or
Dutchmen, anyway), and even in their cups neither rude nor quarrelsome. Of
the few French people I ever saw drunk (except peasants), all were begging
pardon of the owners of imaginary toes, and making various other polite
concessions to the people whom they believed to be around them. And yet
they drink prodigiously. The customary allowance of every man who can
afford it is a pint of claret at meals, themselves prefaced generally
speaking by an appetizer, and supplemented almost invariably by a cup of
coffee and cognac. He would be quite likely also in the course of the day
to assist in the destruction of a bottle of champagne (almost certain to
do so if a _bon vivant_), and during the afternoon and evening to drink
several glasses of beer, perhaps taking a "night-cap" of hot wine before
going to bed. All this would not necessarily make him drunk, but continued
day by day it keeps him under the influence of a continual stimulus, which
in time becomes indispensable and contributes to form the Hotspur
character of which we hear so much. Strange it should not make drunkards
outright, but it does not seem to produce that effect; and Paris, with all
its luxuries in drink, is not a drunken city. You see more drunken people
in a week in New York than in a year in Paris, and more people who, if not
drunk, are unmistakable topers. They drink hard in Brittany (it is no
unusual thing there to see a woman drunk), and so too in the manufacturing
places of Normandy and other parts of France, especially those that
produce no wine; and Champney, who doubtless studied from life, painted at
Ecouen the picture of an old pe