Paris offers anything you may wish [writes Chopin].  You can amuse yourself, mope, laugh, weep, in short, do whatever you like; no one notices it, because thousands do the same.  Everybody goes his own way....The Parisians are a peculiar people.  When evening sets in one hears nothing but the crying of titles of little new books, which consist of from three to four sheets of nonsense.  The boys know so well how to recommend their wares that in the end—­willing or not—­one buys one for a sou.  They bear titles such as these:—­“L’art de faire, des amours, et de les conserver ensuite”; “Les amours des pretres”; “L’Archeveque de Paris avec Madame la duchesse de Berry”; and a thousand similar absurdities which, however, are often very wittily written.  One cannot but be astonished at the means people here make use of to earn a few pence.

All this and much more may be seen in Paris every day, but in 1831 Paris life was not an everyday life.  It was then and there, if at any time and anywhere, that the “roaring loom of Time” might be heard:  a new garment was being woven for an age that longed to throw off the wornout, tattered, and ill-fitting one inherited from its predecessors; and discontent and hopefulness were the impulses that set the shuttle so busily flying hither and thither.  This movement, a reaction against the conventional formalism and barren, superficial scepticism of the preceding age, had ever since the beginning of the century been growing in strength and breadth.  It pervaded all the departments of human knowledge and activity—­politics, philosophy, religion, literature, and the arts.  The doctrinaire school in politics and the eclectic school in philosophy were as characteristic products of the movement as the romantic school in poetry and art.  We recognise the movement in Lamennais’ attack on religious indifference, and in the gospel of a “New Christianity” revealed by Saint Simon and preached and developed by Bazard and Enfantin, as well as in the teaching of Cousin, Villemain, and Guizot, and in the works of V. Hugo, Delacroix, and others.  Indeed, unless we keep in view as far as possible all the branches into which the broad stream divides itself, we shall not be able to understand the movement aright either as a whole or in its parts.  V. Hugo defines the militant—­i.e., negative side of romanticism as liberalism in literature.  The positive side of the liberalism of the time might, on the other hand, not inaptly be described as romanticism in speculation and practice.  This, however, is matter rather for a history of civilisation than for a biography of an artist.  Therefore, without further enlarging on it, I shall let Chopin depict the political aspect of Paris in 1831 as he saw it, and then attempt myself a slight outline sketch of the literary and artistic aspect of the French capital, which signifies France.

Louis Philippe had been more than a year on the throne, but the agitation of the country was as yet far from being allayed:—­