When we turn from the world of intellect to that of ordinary life the same charm haunts our footsteps.  Everything is so well done, so gracefully and so winningly presented!  The exquisite perfume of refinement hangs about every trivial detail.  Your washerwoman is a lady, and your coalman a Chesterfield.  If a Frenchman is ever rude, he is rude with malice prepense and aforethought.  He knows better, we may be sure.  Patrick may err on the score of politeness from ignorance, but Alphonse is a beast only because he chooses to be bestial.  All the traditions of his race run counter to his conduct when he forgets the supreme suavity that should characterize a Gaul.

And yet it is possible for an American—­or rather an Anglo-Saxon—­to live for years in the midst of this brilliant, polished, fascinating people, and never to feel specially interested in them, either individually or nationally.  What is the reason?  Why is it that, loving Paris like a second home, we do not take the Parisians to our hearts as brothers and sisters, or at least as dear first cousins?  The causes are many and various.  In the first place, the Parisians do not like us.  The popularity which Americans were said to possess in Paris has vanished with the Empire—­that is, if it really existed.  It probably was nothing more at any time than the courtesy shown by an astute sovereign of a nation of shopkeepers to a nation of purchasers.  To-day Americans are not popular in Parisian society.  It is almost impossible that they should be.  Our ideas, our social customs, our notions of right and wrong, are diametrically opposed to all the social theories of France.  Our girls, with their free frank ways and their liberty of speech and action, are so many disreputable horrors in Parisian eyes.  Madame la Comtesse de St. Germain would as soon think of taking her daughters to see Schneider as of permitting them to associate with young ladies who are allowed to receive morning calls from gentlemen without the presence of their parents—­who call the male friends of their childhood by their first names—­and who are suffered to witness Faust at the opera and La Haine at La Gaite.  Americans, especially wealthy ones, usually draw around them a vast circle of French acquaintances, it is true, but these are mostly sponges and adventurers, well born and well bred, it may be, but decidedly, to use a vulgar but expressive American idiom, “on the make.”  Of the pure and inner sanctuary of French society scarce a glimpse is afforded to these alien eyes.  It would not amuse them very much if it were, for, by all accounts, this hallowed inner circle is as dull as it is exclusive.  The charm of French society is to be found in those salons which are frequented by the kings of Parisian Bohemia—­journalists, poets, dramatists, artists—­wherein the Republic is queen and Victor Hugo a god.