Chapter XI: Letter X

Faubourg St. Germain--Quartier Latin--The
Book-stalls--Phrenologists--Dupuytren’s Room--Medical
Students--Lodgings--Bill at the Sorbonne--French Cookery--A
Gentleman’s Boarding-house--The Locomotive Cook--Fruit--The
Pension--The Landlady--Pleasure in being duped--Smile of a French
Landlady--The Boarding-house--Amiable Ladies--The Luxembourg
Gardens--The Grisettes--Their naïveté and simplicity--Americans
sent to Paris--Parisian Morals--Advantages in visiting Old
Countries--American Society in Paris.

_Paris, November 24th, 1835._

Nearly all who love to woo the silent muses are assembled in this region, the _Faubourg St. Germain_. Here are the libraries bending under their ponderous loads, and here are the schools and colleges, and all the establishments devoted to science and letters; for which reason, no doubt, it is dignified by the name of the _Quartier Latin_. When the west of the river was yet overspread with its forests, this quarter was covered with houses, and adorned with a palace and amphitheatre, baths, an aqueduct, and a “Field of Mars” for the parade of the Roman troops, where Julius Cæsar used to make them shoulder their firelocks.

But now, though it contains a fourth of the population of the town, and retains its literary character, so far has luxury got ahead of philosophy, that it has no greater dignity of name than the “_Faubourgs_.” It stands apart as if the city of some other people. Some few, indeed, from the fashionable districts, in a desperate Captain Ross kind of expedition, do sometimes come over here, and have got back safe, but having found nothing but books and such things of little interest, it remains unexplored.

The population has become new by retaining its old customs. By standing still it shews the “march of intellect” through the rest of the city. Here you see yet that venerable old man who wears a cue and powder, and buckles his shoes, and calls his shop a _boutique_; who garters up his stockings over the knees, goes to bed at eight, and snuffs the candle with his fingers; and you see everywhere the innumerable people, clattering through the muddy and narrow lanes in their _sabots_. Poverty not being able to get lodgings in the Rue Rivoli, the Palais Royal, and, though she tried hard, in the Boulevards, has been obliged, on account of the cheap rents, to come over here and to strike up a sort of partnership with science, and they now carry on various kinds of industry, under the firm of _Misère et Compagnie_.

In the central section of this Latin country, the staple is the bookshop. Everywhere you will see the little store embossed with its innumerable volumes inside and out, on the ceilings, on the floor, and on screens throughout the room, leaving just a little space for a little bookseller; and stalls are covered with the same article in the open air, in all those positions where, in other towns, you find mutton and fat beef. When you see a long file of Institutes and Bartholos wrapped in their yellow parchment, you are near the Temple of Themis--the _Ecole des Lois_.

When you see in descending St. Jaques, a morose, surly, bibliomaniacal little man, entrenched behind a Homer, a Horace, and a Euclid’s Elements, that is the _Collège de France_; and when you stumble over a pile of the Martyrs, it is the _Sorbonne_; and as you approach the _Ecole Médecine_, five hundred Bichats and Richerands beckon you to its threshold. Besides, you will see ladies and gentlemen looking out from the neighbouring windows, and recommending themselves in their various anatomical appearances; _en squellette_, or half dissected, or turned wrong side out. There is a shop, too, of phrenological skulls, and a lady who will explain you the bumps; and if you like, you can get yourself felt for a franc or two, and she will tell you where is your _Philo-pro_--what do you call it? She told me our intellectual qualities were placed in front, and the sensual in the back part of the skull, very happily, because the former could look out ahead, and keep the latter in order. And next door is a shop of all the wax preparations of human forms and diseases, and here is another lady who will point you out their resemblances with originals, who will analyse you a man into all his component parts, and put him up again; and she puts up, also, “magnificent skeletons” and mannikins for foreign countries.

Now and then you will see arrive a cart, which pours out a dozen, or so, of naked men and women, as you do a cord of wood, upon the pavement, which are distributed into the dissecting rooms, after the ladies and gentlemen standing about have sufficiently entertained themselves with the spectacle. And just step into “Dupuytren’s Room,” and you will see all the human diseases, arranged beautifully in families; here is the plague, and there is the cholera morbus; here is the gout, and there is the palsy staring you in the face; and there are whole cabinets of sprained ankles, broken legs, dislocated shoulders, and cracked skulls. In a word, every thing is literary in this quarter. One evening you are invited to a party for squaring the circle, another for finding out the longitude; and another:--“My dear sir, come this evening, we have just got in a subject. The autopsis will begin at six.”

The medical students are about four thousand; those of law and theology about the same number; and many a one lodges, eats, and clothes himself, and keeps his sweetheart, all for twelve dollars per month. With the exception of the last, I am living a kind of student’s life. I have a room twenty feet square, overlooking, from the second story, the beautiful garden of the Luxembourg, and the great gate opening from the _Rue d’Enfer_. This is my parlour during the day, and a cabinet having a bed, and opening into it, converts the two into a bed-chamber for the night; and the price, including services, is eight dollars per month.

I find at ten, a small table covered with white porcelain, and a very neat little Frenchwoman comes smiling in with a coffee-pot in one hand, and a pitcher of boiling milk in the other, and pours me out with her rosy fingers a large cup of the best _café au lait_ in the world, and sits down herself, and descants fluently on the manners and customs of the capital, and improves my facilities in French.

If you wish bad coffee, it is not to be had in this country. The accompaniments are two eggs, or some equivalent relish, a piece of fresh butter, and a small loaf of bread--all this for eighteen sous, (a sou is a twentieth less than our cent.) I dine out wherever I may chance to be, and according to the voracity or temperance of my appetite, from one and a half to five francs, at six o’clock. A French dinner comes at the most sociable hour, when the cares and labours of the day are past, and the mind can give itself up entirely to its enjoyments, or its repose.

I have dined sometimes at the illustrious Flicoteau’s on the Place Sorbonne, with the medical students, and have looked upon the rooms once occupied by J. Jaques Rousseau, and upon the very dial on which he could not teach Thérése, his grisette wife, to count the hours. I have dined, too, at Viot’s, with the law students, and have taken coffee with Molière, and Fontenelle, and Voltaire, at the Procope. The following is a bill at the Sorbonne.

A service of Soup, 3 Sous.
Vegetables, 3 “
Meat, 6 “
Fish, 6 “
Bread, 2 “
--
20

You have also, which serves at once for vinegar and wine, a half bottle of claret, at six sous; and a dessert, a bunch of grapes or three cherries, for two; or of sweetmeats, a most delicate portion--one of those infinitesimals of a dose, such as the Homœopathists administer in desperate cases. Yet this--if a dish were only what it professes to be on its face, the soup, not the rinsings of the dishcloth, the fricassee not poached upon the swill-tub,--this would still be supportable--if a macaroni were only a macaroni; which in a cheap Paris fare, I understand, is not to be presumed. In sober sadness, this is very bad.

We have a right to expect that a thing which calls itself a hare, should not be a cat. But, alas! it is the end of all human refinement, that hypocrisy should take the place of truth. You can discern no better the component parts of a French dish in a French cookery, than you can a virtue in a condiment of French affability. But ----. It is an homage which a horse’s rump renders to a beefsteak. At my last dinner here, I had two little ribs held together in indissoluble matrimony of mutton. I tried to divorce them, but to no purpose, till the perspiration began to flow abundantly. I called the “garçon,” and exhibited to him their toughness.--“_Cependant, Monsieur, le mouton était magnifique!_” I offered him five francs if he would sit down and eat it; he refused. He had perhaps a mother or some poor relation depending on him; I did not insist.

M. Flicoteau belongs to the romantic school. I prefer the classical. I need hardly say that the French students, who dine here, have an unhealthy and shrivelled appearance--you recollect the last run of the shad on the Juniatta. It is the very spot on which the Sorbonne used to starve its monks, and M. Flicoteau, for his own sake, keeps starving people here ever since? Sixteen sous is a student’s ordinary dinner. His common allowance for clothing, and other expenses by the year, is three hundred dollars.

He eats for a hundred, lodges for fifty, and has the remainder for his wardrobe and amusements. The students of medicine are mostly poor and laborious, and being obliged to follow their filthy occupation of dissecting, are negligent of dress and manners. The disciples of the law are more from the richer classes, have idle time, keep better company, and have an air _plus distingué_.

The doctors of law in all countries take rank above medicine. The question of precedence, I recollect, was determined by the Duke of Mantua’s fool, who observed that the “rogue always walks ahead of the executioner.” Theology, alas! hides her head in a peaceful corner of the Sorbonne, where once she domineered, and begs to be unnoticed in her humble and abject fortunes. A student of Divinity eats a _soup maigre_, a _riz-au-lait_, flanked by a dessert of sour grapes. His meals would take him to Heaven, if he had no other merits.

The other resorts of eating, besides the restaurants, are as follow: the _Gargotte_, the _Cuisine Bourgeoise_, and, of a higher grade, the _Pension Bourgeoise_. In the Gargotte you don’t get partridges. Your dinner costs seven sous. You have a little meat, dry and somewhat stringy, veal or mutton, whichever Monsieur pleases. Whether it died the natural way, or a violent death by the hands of the butcher, it is impossible to know. You have, besides, a thick soup, a loaf of bread three feet long, standing in the corner by the broom, and fried potatoes; also, water and the servant girl _à discretion_. At seventeen sous, you have all the aforesaid delicacies, with a table cloth into the bargain; and at twenty, the luxurious addition of a napkin, and a fork of Algiers metal. This is the Gargotte.

When you have got to twenty-five sous, you are in the Cuisine Bourgeoise. Here your “couvert,” consists of a spoon, a fork, a knife, a napkin, a glass, and a small bottle, called a caraffon; your plate is changed--already a step towards civilization; and you have a cucumber a foot long, radishes a little withered, asparagus just getting to seed, and salt and pepper, artistly arranged; and a horse’s rump cooked into a beefsteak, and washed down with “_veritable macon_”--that is, the best sort of logwood alcoholised. You have, also, a little dessert here of sour grapes, wrinkled apricots, or green figs, which are exhibited for sale, at the window, between meals.

The flaps of mutton and the drumsticks of turkeys, which you get so tender, have been served up, once or twice, at the Hotel Ordinary; but they are preferred much to the original dishes. One likes sometimes better Ephraim’s gleanings, than Abiezer’s vintage. The French have a knack of letting nothing go to loss. Why they make more of a dead horse or cow than others of the living ones. They do not even waste the putrid offals of the butcheries; they sell the maggots to feed chickens.

But when you pay forty sous, that’s quite another affair. You are now in the _monde gourmande_. Spinage has butter in it; custards have sugar in them; soup is called _potage_;--everything now has an honest name; bouilli is _bœuf à la mode_; fried potatoes _pomme de terre à la maitre d’hotel_; and a baked cat is, _lapin sauté a l’estragon_. This is the gentleman’s boarding-house.

I mean by gentleman, a youth, who has just come over from England or America, to the lectures, or a French clerk of the _corps bureaucratique_, or an apprentice philosopher, who calls himself a “man of letters.” It is one of the advantages of this place, that you are not often oppressed by the intelligence and gravity of your convives, and have a chance of shining. It is in the power of any man to have wit, if he but knows how to select his company. In this _pension_, the dishes succeed one another, and are not crammed, as on our tables, _roti fricandeau_, _salade_, _vol au vent_--all into the same service, to distract and pall the appetite, or get cold waiting on each other.

The coquetry of a French kitchen keeps alive expectation, and enhances enjoyment by surprise. You have here, too, the advantage of a male cook; the kitchen prefers the masculine to the feminine, like the grammars; and, besides, you have the tranquillity of a private house. If you ask a dish at Flicoteau’s, the waiter bawls it down to the kitchen, and as they are continually asking, he is continually bawling. At the end of the feast, you will see, standing before you, a tumbler full of toothpicks, one of which you will keep fumbling in your mouth the whole afternoon, as an evidence you have dined; and especially if you have not dined--for then you must keep up appearances;--some grease their mouths with a candle, and then you think they have been eating _paté de foie gras_.

I am sorry to have forgotten the locomotive cook; I mean a woman with an _appareil de cuisine_ about her neck, having meat and fish hung, by hooks, on both her haunches, and sausages, or fish, or potatoes, hissing in a frying-pan; and diffusing, for twenty yards around, a most appetising flavour. She haunts, usually, the Pont Neuf and its vicinity, and looks like gastronomy personified. She will give you, for four sous, of potatoes, with yesterday’s gazette, and, reclining under the parapet of the Quai--the king perhaps, all the while, envying you from the heights of the Louvre--you eat a more wholesome dinner at ten sous, than at the Place Sorbonne at twenty-four.

All the common world of Paris buys its provisions second-hand. The farmer arrives about two in the morning--he sells out to the hucksters, and these latter to the public, mixing in the leavings of the preceding day, a rotten egg with a fresh one, &c. A patient old woman, having nothing else to do, speculates over a bushel of potatoes, or a _botte_ of onions, twice twenty-four hours; and your milkwoman, perhaps, never saw a cow; cows are expensive in slops and provender, and snails and plaster of Paris are to be had almost for nothing. The French eat greater quantities of bread than their neighbours--and why at a cheaper rate?--The price is fixed, by the police, every fortnight, and its average is two-and-a-half cents--sixty per cent. lower than in London; and how much lower than with us? 450 millions of lbs. are consumed in Paris annually; each man eating twelve dollars’ worth. If you establish a Frenchman’s expense at 100, you will find 19 parts for bread, 22 for meat, 27 for wine and spirits.

Peaches, and apples, and melons, are not to be spoken of, in comparison with ours; but cherries, plums, and especially pears, are in great variety and abundance; and the fine grapes of Fontainebleau are eight cents per pound. In England, they have all the fruits of the Indies in the noblemen’s hot-houses; but who can buy them? There are men there who have the conscience to pay £150 for the fruits of a breakfast. “The strawberries at my Lady Stormont’s, last Saturday, cost £150,” says Hannah More. But I must bridle in my muse: she is getting a fit of statistics.

If a gentleman comes to Paris in the dog days, when his countrymen are spread over Europe, at watering places, and elsewhere, and when every soul of a Frenchman is out of town--if he is used to love his friends at home, and be loved by them, and to see them gather around him in the evenings--let him not set a foot in that unnatural thing, a bachelor’s apartment in a furnished hotel, to live alone, to eat alone, and to sleep alone! If he does, let him take leave of his wife and children, and settle his affairs.

Nor let him seek company at the Tavern Ordinary; here the guest arrives just at the hour, hangs up his hat, sits down in his usual place, crosses his legs, runs his fingers through his hair, dines, and then disappears, all the year round, without farther acquaintance. But let him look out a “Pension,” having an amiable landlady, or, which is the same, amiable lodgers. He will become domiciliated here after some time, and find some relief from one of the trying situations of life. You know nothing yet, happily, of the solitude, the desolation, of a populous city to a stranger. How often did I wish, during the first three months, for a cot by the side of some hoar hill of the Mahonoy. Go to a “Pension,” especially if you are a sucking child, like me, in the ways of the world; and the lady of the house, usually a pretty woman, will feel it enjoined upon her humanity to counsel and protect you, and comfort you, or she will manage an acquaintance between you and some countess or baroness, who lodges with her, or at some neighbour’s.

I live now with a most spiritual little creature; she tells me so many obliging lies, and no offensive truths, which I take to be the perfection of politeness in a landlady; and she admits me to her private parties--little family “réunions”--where I play at loto with Madame Thomas, and her three amiable daughters, just for a little cider, or cakes, or chestnuts, to keep up the spirit of the play; and then we have a song, a solo on the violin, or harp, and then a dance; and, finally, we play at little games, which inflict kisses, embraces, and other such penalties.

French people are always so merry; whatever be the amusement, they never let conversation flag, and I don’t see any reason why it should. One, for example, begins to talk of Paris, then the Passage Panorama, then of Mrs. Alexander’s fine cakes, and then the pretty girl that sits behind the counter, and then of pretty girls that sit anywhere; and so one just lets oneself run with the association of ideas, or one makes a digression from the main story, and returns or not, just as one pleases. A Frenchman is always a mimic, an actor, and all that nonsense which we suffer to go to waste in our country, he economises for the enjoyment of society.

I am settled down in the family; I am adopted; the lady gives me, to be sure, now and then “a chance,” as she calls it, of a ticket in a lottery (“the only one left”) of some distinguished lady now reduced, or some lady who has had three children, where one never draws anything; or “a chance” of conducting her and a pretty cousin of hers, who has taken a fancy to me, to the play, who adores the innocency of American manners, and hates the dissipation of the French.

Have you never felt the pleasure of letting yourself be duped? Have you never felt the pleasure of letting your little bark float down the stream when you knew the port lay the other way. I look upon all this as a cheap return for the kindnesses I have so much need of; I am anxious to be cheated, and the truth is, if you do not let a French landlady cheat you now and then, she will drop your acquaintance. Never dispute any small items overcharged in her monthly bill, or she that was smooth as the ermine, will be suddenly bristled as the porcupine; and why, for the sake of limiting some petty encroachment upon your purse, should you turn the bright heaven of her pretty face into a hurricane?

Your actions should always leave a suspicion that you are rich, and then you are sure she will anticipate every want and wish you may have with the liveliest affection; she will be all ravishment at your successes; she will be in an abyss of chagrin at your disappointments. _Helas! oh, mon Dieu!_ and if you cry, she will cry with you! We love money well enough in America, but we do not feel such touches of human kindness, and cannot work ourselves up into such fits of amiability for those who have it. I do not say it is hypocrisy; a French woman really does love you if you have a long purse; and if you have not (I do not say it is hypocrisy neither) she really does hate you.

A great advantage to a French landlady is the sweetness and variety of her smile--a quality in which French women excel universally. Our Madam Gibou keeps her little artillery at play during the whole of the dinner time, and has brought her smile under such a discipline as to suit it exactly to the passion to be represented, or the dignity of the person with whom she exchanges looks.

You can tell any one who is in arrears as if you were her private secretary, or the wealth and liberality of a guest better than his banker, by her smile. If it be a surly knave who counts the pennies with her, the little thing is strangled in its birth; and if one who owes his meals, it miscarries altogether; and for a mere visiter she lets off one worth only three francs and a half; but if a favourite, who never looks into the particulars of her bill, and takes her lottery tickets, then you will see the whole heaven of her face in a blaze, and it does not expire suddenly, but like the fine twilight of a summer evening, dies away gently on her lips.

Sometimes I have seen one flash out like a squib, and leave you at once in the dark; it had lit on the wrong person; and at other times I have seen one struggling long for its life; I have watched it while it was gasping its last; she has a way, too, of knocking a smile on the head; I observed one at dinner to-day, from the very height and bloom of health fall down and die without a kick.

It is strange (that I may praise myself)--but I have a share of attentions in this little circle even greater than they who are amiable. If I say not a word, I am witty, and I am excessively agreeable by sitting still. “The silence often of pure innocence persuades when speaking fails.” My unacquaintance with life and wickedness puts me in immediate _rapport_ with women, and removes many of the little obstacles which suspicious etiquette has set up between the sexes. Ladies, they say, never blush when talking to a blind man.

While a man of address is sailing about and about a woman, as Captain Ross hunting the North-west passage, I am looked upon either as a ship in distress and claiming a generous sympathy and protection, or a prize which belongs to the wreckers, and am towed at once into harbour. Sometimes, indeed, my ignorance of Paris and its ways is taken for affectation, and they suspect me for behaving as great ambassadors do, who affect simplicity to hide their diplomatic rogueries; but he cannot long pass himself for a rogue who is really honest. It is perhaps a mere complexion of physiognomy. I see, every day, faces which remind one of those doors which have written on them, “No admission,” and others, “Walk in without knocking.” It is certain that what we call dignity, however admired on parade, is not a good social quality. “_Dignitas et amor_”--I forget what Ovid says about it.

And women, too, are more familiar and easy of access to modesty of rank. Jupiter, you know, when he made love to Antiope, with all his rays about him, was rejected, and he succeeded afterwards as a satyr. I knew a pretty American woman once, who, gartering up her stockings in the garden, was reminded, that the gardener was looking. “Well! he is only a working man,” she replied, and went on with the exhibition; she would have been frightened to death if it had been a lord. I make these remarks because other travellers would be likely to leave them out, and because it is good to know how to live to advantage in all the various circumstances of life.

In recommending you a French boarding-house, it is my duty at the same time to warn you of some of its dangers, which are as follows: Your landlady will be in arrears for her rent 200 francs, and will confide to you her embarrassment. Having a rigid, inexorable _propriètaire_, and getting into an emergency, she will at length ask you, with many blushes and amiable scruples, the loan of the said money; and her gratitude, poor thing! at the very expectation of getting it, will overcome her so, she will offer you, her arms about your neck, her pretty self, as security for the debt.

This is not all; the baroness (her husband being absent at Moscow, or anywhere else,) will invite you to a supper. She will live in a fine parlour, chamber adjoining, and will entertain you with sprightly and sensible conversation, and all the delicacies of the table, until the stars have climbed half way up the heavens; and you will find yourself _tête-à-tête_ with a lady at midnight, the third bottle of champagne sparkling on the board.--I am glad I did not leave my virtue in America; I should have had such need of it in this country! Indeed, if it had been anybody else, not softened by the experience of nine lustrums; not fortified like me by other affections--if it had been anybody else in the world, he would have been ruined by Madame la Baronne. Nor when you have resisted Russia, have you won all the victories. On a fine summer’s morning, when all is joyous and good-humoured, your landlady will present you the following cards, with notes and explanations. “This is from the belle Gabrielle. She assists her uncle in the store, and is quite disheartened with her business. Uncles are such cross things! This is from one of my acquaintances, Flora--oh, beautiful _au possible_! She paints birds and other objects for the print shops, but she finds the confinement injurious to her health. You must call and see them, especially Flora, she has such a variety of talent besides painting; and she will give you the most convincing proofs of good character and connexions. Gabrielle also is very pretty, but she is a young and innocent creature, and her education, especially her music, not so far advanced.”

The garden of the Luxembourg comes next. It contains near a hundred acres, and lies in the midst of this classical district. It is not so gaily ornamented as the Tuileries, but is rich in picturesque and rural scenery. It has, indeed, two very beautiful ornaments. At the north end, the noble edifice, constructed by Marie de Medicis, the palace of the Luxembourg, which contains a gallery of paintings, the chamber of Peers, and other curiosities; and the Observatory, a stately building, is in symmetry with this palace on the south.

In the interior there are groves of trees and grass plots surrounded by flower-beds; and numerous statues, most of which have seen better days; ranges of trees, and an octagonal piece of water inhabited by two swans, which are now swimming about in graceful solemnity, adorn the parterre in front of the palace. All these objects I have in view of my windows. The garden has altogether an air of philosophy very grateful to men of studious dispositions. Many persons are seated about, in reading or conversation, or strolling with books through its groves, and squads of students are now and then traversing it to their college recitations.

On benches overlooking the parterre is seated, all day long, the veteran of the war, the old soldier, in his regimentals, his sword as a companion laid beside him on the bench; he finds a repose here for his old age amidst the recreations of childhood; and five or six hundred little men in red breeches, whose profession it is to have their brains knocked out for their country at sixpence a day, are drilled here every morning early, to keep step and to handle their firelocks. There is one corner in which there is a fountain surmounted by a nymph, and which has a gloomy and tufted wood, and an appearance of sanctity, which makes it respected by the common world, and by the sun.

One man only is seen walking there at a time, the rest retiring out of respect for his devotions. For a week past it has been frequented daily by a poet. He recites with appropriate action his verses, heedless of the profane crowd. He appears pleased with his compositions, and smiles often, no doubt in anticipation of their immortality. I often sit an hour of an evening at my window, and look down upon the stream of people which flows in and out, and the sentinel who walks up and down by the gate ridiculously grim.

I love to read the views and dispositions of men in their faces. I witness some pleasant flirtations, too, under the adjacent lime trees, and many gratified and disappointed assignations. Now, a lady wrapped in her cloak walks up and down the most secret avenue, upon the anxious watch; the lover comes at length, and she hastens to his embraces, and they vanish; and next in his turn a gentleman walks sentinel, until his lady comes, or, impatient and disappointed, goes off in a rage, or night covers him with her sable mantle.--Were I not bound by so many endearing affections of kindred and friendship to my native country, there is not one spot upon the earth I would prefer to the sweet tranquillity of this delicious retirement.

When you visit the Luxembourg you will see multitudes every where of bouncing demoiselles, with nymph-looking faces, caps without bonnets, and baskets in their hands, traversing the garden from all quarters, running briskly to their work in the morning, and strolling slowly homewards towards evening--These are the _grisettes_. They are very pretty, and have the laudable little custom of falling deeply in love with one. They are common enough all over Paris, but in this classical region they are as the leaves in Vallambrosa. They are in the train of the muses, and love the groves of the Academy. A grisette, in this Latin Quarter, is a branch of education. If a student is ill, his faithful grisette nurses him and cures him; if he is destitute, she works for him; and if he falls into irretrievable misfortune, she dies with him. Thus a mutual dependence endears them to each other; he defends her with his life, and, sure of his protection, she feels her consequence, and struts in her new starched cap the reigning monarch of the Luxembourg.

A grisette never obtrudes her acquaintance, but question her and you will find her circumstantially communicative. Such information as she possesses, and a great deal more, she will retail to you with a naïveté and simplicity, you would swear she was brought up amongst your innocent lambs and turtle-doves of the Shamoken. She is the most ingenious imitation of an innocent woman in the world; and never was language employed more happily for the concealment of thought (I ask pardon of Prince Talleyrand) than in the mouth of a grisette. The Devil is called the father of lies (I ask pardon again of the Prince), but there is not one of these little imps but can outdo her papa in this particular.

When sent with goods from shopkeepers to their customers--the common practice of this place--she will lie and wrestle for her patron, and perjure herself like a Greek; when accused, she will listen to reproaches, insults, even abuse, as long as there is any point of defence, with the resignation of Saint Michael; and there is no trick of the stage, no artifice of rhetoric, recommended by Cicero, that she leaves out in her pleadings; if at last overcome--why, she surrenders.

She remains awhile mute, and then sets herself to look sorry with all her might; at last she bursts into tears, with sighs and sobs, until she disarms you. “Well, let me see what you have got.” She will now wipe away gracefully the briny drops with the corner of her apron, brighten up again, shew you her goods again, and cheat you once more by way of reparation for her former rogueries.

There is a modiste, lodged in the adjoining room, from New Orleans, who entertains about twenty of these every morning at her levee. I make sometimes one of the group, and from this opportunity, and from the lady’s information, I am thus learned about grisettes.

It is important for one’s mamma to know whether it is a good or bad fashion that, so common now-a-days, of sending a young gentleman, just stepping from youth into manhood, to Europe, especially to Paris. I will venture some remarks for your information, though I have no very settled opinion on the subject. I know several Americans engaged here, some in medical and scientific schools, and some in painting and other arts, who appear to me to be exceedingly diligent, and to make as profitable a use of their time as they would anywhere else. I know some who mix pleasure with business, and a little folly with their wisdom; and some (you will please to put me in this class) who do not taste dissipation with their “extremest lips.”

But I know some also, who, under pretext of law and medicine, study mischief only, and return home worse, if possible, than when they came out. I know one now, who, having too much health, overruns his revenues occasionally, and draws upon home for a doctor’s and apothecary’s bill; and another poor devil who has gone to Mont Pieté with his last trinket. There came one from the Mississippi lately, who being very young and rich, and unmarried, set up a kind of seraglio, and died of love yesterday; they are burying him to-day at Père la Chaise.

I know one also, who has lived here nine years, who reads Voltaire, keeps a French cook, and his principles are as French as his stomach; and another who entertains the French noblesse with fêtes and soirées, to the tune of a hundred thousand per annum; from his stable, thirty-six horses, full bred, better than many of his Majesty’s subjects, come prancing out on days of jubilee upon the Boulevards.

If a young man’s morals should get out of order at home, Paris is not exactly the place I would send him to be cured. It is true, if drunkenness be the complaint, it is not a vice of the place; and, if curable at all, which I do not believe, Paris, from its common use of light wines, and variety of amusements, is perhaps the best place to make the attempt. It is certainly not the most dangerous place for falling into this vice. If he be fond of gambling, here it is a genteel accomplishment, and brought out under the patronage of the government. And to keep a mistress is not only not disgraceful in French society, but is always mentioned to one’s credit. It is a part of a gentleman’s equipage, and adds to his gentility; for it implies that he possesses that most considerable merit that a gentleman can aspire to in this country, and most others--money. “_Il a la plus jolie maitresse de Paris!_” you cannot say anything more complimentary if it were of the prime minister, and it would scarce be an injurious imputation if said of one’s father confessor.

If you send, then, your son to Paris, am I uncharitable in surmising that he may sometimes use the privilege of the place? It is, indeed, a question for philosophy to determine (and not for me), which of the two may be the less injurious to his health and morals--the gross intercourse he is exposed to in some other towns, or the more refined gallantries of the French capital. If you can preserve him, by religious and other influences, from either, as well as from the dangers of an ascetic and solitary abstinence--for solitude has its vices as well as dissipation--so much the better. He will be a better husband, a better citizen, and a better man.

But let me tell you that to educate a young man of fortune and leisure, to live through a youth of honesty, has become excessively difficult, even in the chaste nunnery of your “Two Hills;” and to expect that, with money and address, he will live entirely honest in Paris, where women of good quality are thrown in his face--women of art, beauty, and refined education--is to attribute virtues to human nature she is in no way entitled to in any country. He may have some trouble with his conscience, perhaps, the first month or two, but by degrees, he will become reconciled, and get along well enough. If he comes over with some refinement of taste, and moral inclinations and habits, or only on a transient visit, he will be secure from all the dangers (except, perhaps, gambling) to which I have alluded; he will live only in American society, which is quite as good and pure here as at home; he will have no acquaintance with the natives, but of that class in which a gentleman’s morals run less risk of temptation than even from the vulgar intercourse of American towns.

All that part of a city like Paris, that comes into relation with strangers, and lives by deceiving and plundering them, is of course gross and corrupt; yet I do not know any community in which the honesty of a gentleman is so safe from contamination.

It is certainly of much value in the life of an American gentleman to visit these old countries, if it were only to form a just estimate of his own, which he is continually liable to mistake, and always to overrate without objects of comparison; “_nimium se æstimet necesse est, qui se nemini comparat_.” He will always think himself wise who sees nobody wiser; and to know the customs and institutions of foreign countries, which one cannot know well without residing there, is certainly the complement of a good education.

The American society at Paris, taken altogether, is of a good composition. It consists of several hundred persons, of families of fortune, and young men of liberal instruction. Here are lords of cotton from Carolina, and of sugarcane from the Mississippi, millionaires from all the Canadas, and pursers from all the navies; and their social qualities, from a sense of mutual dependence or partnership in absence, or some such causes, are more active abroad than at home. The benevolent affections act in a contrary way from gravitation; they increase as the square of the distance from the centre.

The plain fact is, that Americans in Paris are hospitable in a very high degree; they have no fear of being dogged with company, and have leisure here, which they have nowhere else, to be amiable; the new comer, too, is more tender and thankful, and has a higher relish of hospitality and kindness; and the general example of the place has its effect on their animal spirits.

They form a little republic apart, and when a stranger arrives, he finds himself at home; he finds himself also under the censorial inspection of a public opinion, a salutary restraint, not always the luck of those who travel into foreign countries. One thing only is to be blamed: it becomes every day more the fashion for the _élite_ of our cities to settle themselves here permanently. We cannot but deplore this exportation of the precious metals, since our country is drained of what the supply is not too abundant. They who have resided here a few years, having fortune and leisure, do not choose, as I perceive, to reside anywhere else.

It is now midnight, and more. I have said so much in this letter about grisettes, that I shall have a night-mare of them before morning. This “Latin Quarter,” is one of the most instructing volumes of Paris, but all I can do is just to open you here and there some of its pages, and shew you the pictures. Pictures in this country, recollect, are more _à decouvert_ than in America. Please to make the allowance. Good night!