Two great and ineradicable defects underlie the brightness and fascination of the external part of French character—­namely, selfishness and insincerity.  Perfect in manner, in dress, in grace, in suavity, in sweetness it may be, the French are utterly and wholly unreliable.  They resemble the phantom woman in the story told by Leigh Hunt, that was only a suit of clothes, with no face beneath the hood and no body inside of the robes; or rather those malignant spirits that look like fair women when seen in front, but when seen from behind show only as hollow shells.

And the tradespeople, the bourgeoisie—­your dressmaker, your milliner, your tailor, your butcher and baker and candlestick-maker—­skilled and suave and generally charming—­O heaven and earth! how they do lie!  Not occasionally, not when hard-pressed, not when truth will not do as well, but persistently, calmly, eternally.  “I swear to you, monsieur,” will your Parisian say, “that your work shall be done in two hours,” Esteem yourself fortunate if it is finished in two days:  very probably two weeks will see it still uncompleted.  Send for a workman to execute some little job about your house.  “He will come at once—­yes, at once.”  Days roll round, and he never comes at all.  Your dressmaker agrees to make you a dress for a certain price:  your bill comes home for half as much again.  An American in Paris ordered an extra door-key, giving the original key as a pattern.  The key was to cost four francs.  Here is a copy of the bill as presented: 

Francs. 
For taking off lock (a process wholly unnecessary,
by the by), 1-1/2
For putting it on again, 1-1/2 Workman’s time, 1 Journey from shop (about half a square), 1
Key, 4
____
Total 9

Another American sent for a bell-hanger to inspect an electric bell which was thought to be out of order, but which proved on inspection to be all right.  He got a bill of five francs, whereof one item ran thus:  “For looking at the bell, 2 francs.”  He had not touched the thing, be it borne in mind.

I cannot refrain from here making answer to a remark too often heard from American lips, that America is as immoral as France—­that American society is every whit as depraved as the French.  It is not.  The immorality of America is as a festering wound on an otherwise healthy body:  the immorality of France is like a scrofulous taint that poisons the whole life-current.  One gets weary and heartsick with the old eternal song, the everlasting theme, which is sung and told and dramatized and written about and painted—­that flies in your face at every corner and stares up at you from every inch of printed paper, every square of colored canvas, in the whole nationality.  And to sum up at last this, “a woman’s opinion,” I will freely state that the longer I live in France the more I admire the Parisians and the less I like them.