I accordingly engaged a room in the house of a lady of pure French extraction and education, who supplements the shortcomings of an income insufficient to the ever-growing demands of the Parisian system of sense-gratification, by providing food and lodging for a limited number of distinguished strangers.  I should have preferred to have my room alone in the house, and to take my meals in a brewery, of very good appearance, which I speedily discovered in the same street; but this arrangement, though very lucidly proposed by myself; was not acceptable to the mistress of the establishment (a woman with a mathematical head), and I have consoled myself for the extra expense by fixing my thoughts upon the opportunity that conformity to the customs of the house gives me of studying the table-manners of my companions, and of observing the French nature at a peculiarly physiological moment, the moment when the satisfaction of the taste, which is the governing quality in its composition, produces a kind of exhalation, an intellectual transpiration, which, though light and perhaps invisible to a superficial spectator, is nevertheless appreciable by a properly adjusted instrument.

I have adjusted my instrument very satisfactorily (I mean the one I carry in my good square German head), and I am not afraid of losing a single drop of this valuable fluid, as it condenses itself upon the plate of my observation.  A prepared surface is what I need, and I have prepared my surface.

Unfortunately here, also, I find the individual native in the minority.  There are only four French persons in the house—­the individuals concerned in its management, three of whom are women, and one a man.  This preponderance of the feminine element is, however, in itself characteristic, as I need not remind you what an abnormally—­developed part this sex has played in French history.  The remaining figure is apparently that of a man, but I hesitate to classify him so superficially.  He appears to me less human than simian, and whenever I hear him talk I seem to myself to have paused in the street to listen to the shrill clatter of a hand-organ, to which the gambols of a hairy homunculus form an accompaniment.

I mentioned to you before that my expectation of rough usage, in consequence of my German nationality, had proved completely unfounded.  No one seems to know or to care what my nationality is, and I am treated, on the contrary, with the civility which is the portion of every traveller who pays the bill without scanning the items too narrowly.  This, I confess, has been something of a surprise to me, and I have not yet made up my mind as to the fundamental cause of the anomaly.  My determination to take up my abode in a French interior was largely dictated by the supposition that I should be substantially disagreeable to its inmates.  I wished to observe the different forms taken by the irritation that I should naturally