We do not now speak of that floating population from all parts, for whom our French Babylon is the caravansary of Europe:  a phalanx of thinkers, artists, men of business, and travellers, who, like Homer’s hero, have arrived in their intellectual country after beholding “many peoples and cities;” but of the settled Parisian, who keeps his appointed place, and lives on his own floor like the oyster on his rock, a curious vestige of the credulity, the slowness, and the simplicity of bygone ages.

For one of the singularities of Paris is, that it unites twenty populations completely different in character and manners.  By the side of the gypsies of commerce and of art, who wander through all the several stages of fortune or fancy, live a quiet race of people with an independence, or with regular work, whose existence resembles the dial of a clock, on which the same hand points by turns to the same hours.  If no other city can show more brilliant and more stirring forms of life, no other contains more obscure and more tranquil ones.  Great cities are like the sea:  storms agitate only the surface; if you go to the bottom, you find a region inaccessible to the tumult and the noise.

For my part, I have settled on the verge of this region, but do not actually live in it.  I am removed from the turmoil of the world, and live in the shelter of solitude, but without being able to disconnect my thoughts from the struggle going on.  I follow at a distance all its events of happiness or grief; I join the feasts and the funerals; for how can he who looks on, and knows what passes, do other than take part?  Ignorance alone can keep us strangers to the life around us:  selfishness itself will not suffice for that.

These reflections I made to myself in my attic, in the intervals of the various household works to which a bachelor is forced when he has no other servant than his own ready will.  While I was pursuing my deductions, I had blacked my boots, brushed my coat, and tied my cravat; I had at last arrived at the important moment when we pronounce complacently that all is finished, and that well.

A grand resolve had just decided me to depart from my usual habits.  The evening before, I had seen by the advertisements that the next day was a holiday at Sevres, and that the china manufactory would be open to the public.  I was tempted by the beauty of the morning, and suddenly decided to go there.

On my arrival at the station on the left bank, I noticed the crowd hurrying on in the fear of being late.  Railroads, besides many other advantages, possess that of teaching the French punctuality.  They will submit to the clock when they are convinced that it is their master; they will learn to wait when they find they will not be waited for.  Social virtues, are, in a great degree, good habits.  How many great qualities are grafted into nations by their geographical position, by political necessity, and by institutions!  Avarice was destroyed for a time among the Lacedaemonians by the creation of an iron coinage, too heavy and too bulky to be conveniently hoarded.