I found the dissatisfied spirit of a young artist, whom I had known in America, here completely soothed; instead of feeling himself overpowered by the commercial spirit of his own country, one of a neglected minority, striving in vain to excite interest in a vocation too profitless for a community absorbed in trade, politics, and fashion, he now experienced the advantage of a recognized class, and the excitement of a fraternity in art; his life, studies, aims were those of hundreds as limited in their circumstances and as ideal in their aspirations; galleries, studios, lectures, models, criticism, illustrious men, noble examples, friendly words and true companionship, made his daily life, independent of its achievements, one of self-respect, of growing knowledge, and assured satisfaction.  Without some pursuit thus enlisting the higher powers and justifying, as it were, the independent career of a resident, it 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