“Gentlemen,” I said, in my vexation, and rather angrily, “you are all wrong, for my stomach is excellent, and I have not had any supper.”

Thereupon an elderly man told me, with a voice full of sweetness, that I ought not to say that the gentlemen were wrong, though I might say that they were not right, thus imitating Cicero, who, instead of declaring to the Romans that Catilina and the other conspirators were dead, only said that they had lived.

“Is it not the same thing?”

“I beg your pardon, sir, one way of speaking is polite, the other is not.”  And after treating me to a long dissection on politeness, he concluded by saying, with a smile, “I suppose you are an Italian?”

“Yes, I am, but would you oblige me by telling me how you have found it out?”

“Oh!  I guessed it from the attention with which you have listened to my long prattle.”

Everybody laughed, and, I, much pleased with his eccentricity, began to coax him.  He was the tutor of a young boy of twelve or thirteen years who was seated near him.  I made him give me during the journey lessons in French politeness, and when we parted he took me apart in a friendly manner, saying that he wished to make me a small present.

“What is it?”

“You must abandon, and, if I may say so, forget, the particle ‘non’, which you use frequently at random.  ‘Non’ is not a French word; instead of that unpleasant monosyllable, say, ‘Pardon’.  ‘Non’ is equal to giving the lie:  never say it, or prepare yourself to give and to receive sword-stabs every moment.”

“I thank you, monsieur, your present is very precious, and I promise you never to say non again.”

During the first fortnight of my stay in Paris, it seemed to me that I had become the most faulty man alive, for I never ceased begging pardon.  I even thought, one evening at the theatre, that I should have a quarrel for having begged somebody’s pardon in the wrong place.  A young fop, coming to the pit, trod on my foot, and I hastened to say,

“Your pardon, sir.”

“Sir, pardon me yourself.”

“No, yourself.”

“Yourself!”

“Well, sir, let us pardon and embrace one another!” The embrace put a stop to the discussion.

One day during the journey, having fallen asleep from fatigue in the inconvenient gondola, someone pushed my arm.

“Ah, sir! look at that mansion!”

“I see it; what of it?”

“Ah!  I pray you, do you not find it....”

“I find nothing particular; and you?”

“Nothing wonderful, if it were not situated at a distance of forty leagues from Paris.  But here!  Ah! would my ‘badauds’ of Parisians believe that such a beautiful mansion can be found forty leagues distant from the metropolis?  How ignorant a man is when he has never travelled!”

“You are quite right.”

That man was a Parisian and a ‘badaud’ to the backbone, like a Gaul in the days of Caesar.