I hardly know which was the pleasanter time.  By this time I was no stranger to Paris, and had many friends there.  It was my first experiment of living there as a bachelor, as I was going to say, but I mean “on my own hook,” and left altogether to my own devices.  I found of course that my then experiences differed considerably from those acquired when living en famille.  But I am disposed to think that the tolerably intimate knowledge I flatter myself I possessed of the Paris and Parisians of Louis Philippe’s time was mainly the result of this second residence.  I remember among a host of things indicating the extent of the difference between those days and these, that I lived in a very good apartment, au troisieme, in one of the streets immediately behind the best part of the Rue de Rivoli for one hundred francs a month!  This price included all service (save of course a tip to the porter), and the preparation of my coffee for breakfast if I needed it.  For dinner, or any other meal, I had to go out.

“Society” lived in Paris in those days—­not unreasonably as the result soon showed—­in perpetual fear of being knocked all to pieces by an outbreak of revolution, though of course nobody said so.  But I lived mainly (though not entirely) among the bien pensants people, who looked on all anti-governmental manifestations with horror.  Perhaps the restless discontent which destroyed Louis Philippe’s government is the most disheartening circumstance in the whole course of recent French history.  That the rule of Charles Dix should have occasioned revolt may be regrettable, but is not a matter for surprise.  But that of Louis Philippe was not a stagnant or retrogressive regime.  “La carriere” was very undeniably open to talent and merit of every description.  Material well-being was on the increase.  And the door was not shut against any political change which even very advanced Liberalism, of the kind consistent with order, might have aspired to.  But the Liberalism which moved France was not of that kind.

One of my most charming friends of those days, Rosa Stewart, who afterwards became and was well known to literature as Madame Blaze de Bury, was both too clever and too shrewd an observer, as well as, to me at least, too frank to pretend any of the assurance which was then de mode.  She saw what was coming, and was fully persuaded that it must come.  I hope that her eye may rest on this testimony to her perspicacity, though I know not whether she still graces this planet with her very pleasing presence.  For as, alas! in so many scores of other instances, our lives have drifted apart, and it is many years since I have heard of her.

One excursion I specially remember in connection with that autumn was partly, I think, a pedestrian one, to Amiens and Beauvais, made in company with the W——­ A——­, of whom my brother speaks in his autobiography; which I mention chiefly for the sake of recording my testimony to the exactitude of his description of that very singular individual.  If it had not been for the continual carefulness necessitated by the difficulty of avoiding all cause of quarrel, I should say that he was about the pleasantest travelling companion I have ever known.