produce; for it is under the influence of irritation that the French character most completely expresses itself.  My presence, however, does not appear to operate as a stimulus, and in this respect I am materially disappointed.  They treat me as they treat every one else; whereas, in order to be treated differently, I was resigned in advance to be treated worse.  I have not, as I say, fully explained to myself this logical contradiction; but this is the explanation to which I tend.  The French are so exclusively occupied with the idea of themselves, that in spite of the very definite image the German personality presented to them by the war of 1870, they have at present no distinct apprehension of its existence.  They are not very sure that there are any Germans; they have already forgotten the convincing proofs of the fact that were presented to them nine years ago.  A German was something disagreeable, which they determined to keep out of their conception of things.  I therefore think that we are wrong to govern ourselves upon the hypothesis of the revanche; the French nature is too shallow for that large and powerful plant to bloom in it.

The English-speaking specimens, too, I have not been willing to neglect the opportunity to examine; and among these I have paid special attention to the American varieties, of which I find here several singular examples.  The two most remarkable are a young man who presents all the characteristics of a period of national decadence; reminding me strongly of some diminutive Hellenised Roman of the third century.  He is an illustration of the period of culture in which the faculty of appreciation has obtained such a preponderance over that of production that the latter sinks into a kind of rank sterility, and the mental condition becomes analogous to that of a malarious bog.  I learn from him that there is an immense number of Americans exactly resembling him, and that the city of Boston, indeed, is almost exclusively composed of them.  (He communicated this fact very proudly, as if it were greatly to the credit of his native country; little perceiving the truly sinister impression it made upon me.)

What strikes one in it is that it is a phenomenon to the best of my knowledge—­and you know what my knowledge is—­unprecedented and unique in the history of mankind; the arrival of a nation at an ultimate stage of evolution without having passed through the mediate one; the passage of the fruit, in other words, from crudity to rottenness, without the interposition of a period of useful (and ornamental) ripeness.  With the Americans, indeed, the crudity and the rottenness are identical and simultaneous; it is impossible to say, as in the conversation of this deplorable young man, which is one and which is the other; they are inextricably mingled.  I prefer the talk of the French homunculus; it is at least more amusing.