IV.  Enjoyment.

The charm of this life. — Etiquette in the 18th Century. — Its perfection and its resources. -Taught and prescribed under feminine authority.

A society which obtains such ascendancy must possess some charm; in no country, indeed, and in no age has so perfect a social art rendered life so agreeable.  Paris is the school-house of Europe, a school of urbanity to which the youth of Russia, Germany, and England resort to become civilized.  Lord Chesterfield in his letters never tires of reminding his son of this, and of urging him into these drawing-rooms, which will remove “his Cambridge rust.”  Once familiar with them they are never abandoned, or if one is obliged to leave them, one always sighs for them.  “Nothing is comparable,” says Voltaire,[42] “to the genial life one leads there in the bosom of the arts and of a calm and refined voluptuousness; strangers and monarchs have preferred this repose, so agreeably occupied in it and so enchanting to their own countries and thrones.  The heart there softens and melts away like aromatics slowly dissolving in moderate heat, evaporating in delightful perfumes.”  Gustavus III, beaten by the Russians, declares that he will pass his last days in Paris in a house on the boulevards; and this is not merely complimentary, for he sends for plans and an estimate.[43] A supper or an evening entertainment brings people two hundred leagues away.  Some friends of the Prince de Ligne “leave Brussels after breakfast, reach the opera in Paris just in time to see the curtain rise, and, after the spectacle is over, return immediately to Brussels, traveling all night.” — Of this delight, so eagerly sought, we have only imperfect copies, and we are obliged to revive it intellectually.  It consists, in the first place, in the pleasure of living with perfectly polite people; there is no enjoyment more subtle, more lasting, more inexhaustible.  Man’s self-esteem or vanity being infinite, intelligent people are always able to produce some refinement of attention to gratify it.  Worldly sensibility being infinite there is no imperceptible shade of it permitting indifference.  After all, Man is still the greatest source of happiness or of misery to Man, and in those days this everflowing fountain brought to him sweetness instead of bitterness.  Not only was it essential not to offend, but it was essential to please; one was expected to lose sight of oneself in others, to be always cordial and good-humored, to keep one’s own vexations and grievances in one’s own breast, to spare others melancholy ideas and to supply them with cheerful ideas.