Alas! thought I with vexation, each of us is like these masqueraders; our whole life is often but an unsightly Carnival!  And yet man has need of holidays, to relax his mind, rest his body, and open his heart.  Can he not have them, then, with these coarse pleasures?  Economists have been long inquiring what is the best disposal of the industry of the human race.  Ah! if I could only discover the best disposal of its leisure!  It is easy enough to find it work; but who will find it relaxation?  Work supplies the daily bread; but it is cheerfulness that gives it a relish.  O philosophers! go in quest of pleasure! find us amusements without brutality, enjoyments without selfishness; in a word, invent a Carnival that will please everybody, and bring shame to no one.

Three o’clock.—­I have just shut my window, and stirred up my fire.  As this is a holiday for everybody, I will make it one for myself, too.  So I light the little lamp over which, on grand occasions, I make a cup of the coffee that my portress’s son brought from the Levant, and I look in my bookcase for one of my favorite authors.

First, here is the amusing parson of Meudon; but his characters are too fond of talking slang:—­Voltaire; but he disheartens men by always bantering them:—­Moliere; but he hinders one’s laughter by making one think:—­Lesage; let us stop at him.  Being profound rather than grave, he preaches virtue while ridiculing vice; if bitterness is sometimes to be found in his writings, it is always in the garb of mirth:  he sees the miseries of the world without despising it, and knows its cowardly tricks without hating it.

Let us call up all the heroes of his book....  Gil Blas, Fabrice, Sangrado, the Archbishop of Granada, the Duke of Lerma, Aurora, Scipio!  Ye gay or graceful figures, rise before my eyes, people my solitude; bring hither for my amusement the world-carnival, of which you are the brilliant maskers!

Unfortunately, at the very moment I made this invocation, I recollected I had a letter to write which could not be put off.  One of my attic neighbors came yesterday to ask me to do it.  He is a cheerful old man, and has a passion for pictures and prints.  He comes home almost every day with a drawing or painting—­probably of little value; for I know he lives penuriously, and even the letter that I am to write for him shows his poverty.  His only son, who was married in England, is just dead, and his widow—­left without any means, and with an old mother and a child—­had written to beg for a home.  M. Antoine asked me first to translate the letter, and then to write a refusal.  I had promised that he should have this answer to-day:  before everything, let us fulfil our promises.

The sheet of “Bath” paper is before me, I have dipped my pen into the ink, and I rub my forehead to invite forth a sally of ideas, when I perceive that I have not my dictionary.  Now, a Parisian who would speak English without a dictionary is like a child without leading-strings; the ground trembles under him, and he stumbles at the first step.  I run then to the bookbinder’s, where I left my Johnson, who lives close by in the square.