CHAPTER I.

Mrs. Rowe’s.

The story I have to tell is disjointed.  I throw it out as I picked it up.  My duties, the nature of which is neither here nor there, have borne me to various parts of Europe.  I am a man, not with an establishment—­but with two portmanteaus.  I have two hats in Paris and two in London always.  I have seen everything in both cities, and like Paris, on the whole, best.  There are many reasons, it seems to me, why an Englishman who has the tastes of a duke and the means of a half-pay major, should prefer the banks of the Seine to those of the Thames—­even with the new Embankment.  Everybody affects a distinct and deep knowledge of Paris in these times; and most people do know how to get the dearest dinner Bignon can supply for their money; and to secure the apartments which are let by the people of the West whom nature has provided with an infinitesimal quantity of conscience.  But there are now crowds of English men and women who know their Paris well; men who never dine in the restaurant of the stranger, and women who are equal to a controversy with a French cook.  These sons and daughters of Albion who have transplanted themselves to French soil, can show good and true reasons why they prefer the French to the English life.  The wearying comparative estimates of household expenses in Westbournia, and household expenses in the Faubourg St. Honore!  One of the disadvantages of living in Paris is the constant contact with the odious atmosphere of comparisons.

“Pray, sir—­you have been in London lately—­what did you pay for veal cutlet?”

[Illustration:  Crossing the Channel—­rather squally.]

The new arrivals are the keenest torments.  “In London, where I have kept house for over twenty years, and have had to endure every conceivable development of servants’ extortion, no cook ever demanded a supply of white aprons yet.”  You explain for the hundredth time that it is the custom in Paris.  There are people who believe Kensington is the domestic model of the civilized world, and travel only to prove at every stage how far the rest of the universe is behind that favoured spot.  He who desires to see how narrow his countrymen and countrywomen can be abroad, and how completely the mass of British travellers lay themselves open to the charge of insularity, and an overweening estimate of themselves and their native customs, should spend a few weeks in a Paris boarding-house, somewhere in the Faubourg St. Honore—­if he would have the full aroma of British conceit.  The most surprising feature of the English quarter of the French capital is the eccentricity of the English visitors, as it strikes their own countrymen.  I cannot find it in me to blame Gallican caricaturists.  The statuettes which enliven the bronze shops; the gaunt figures which are in the chocolate establishments; the prints in the windows under the Rivoli colonnade;