Proprieties, fashions, customs which depend on luxury and breeding, confine the course of life within the limits of the most miserable uniformity.  The pleasure we desire to display to others is a pleasure lost; we neither enjoy it ourselves, nor do others enjoy it. [Footnote:  Two ladies of fashion, who wished to seem to be enjoying themselves greatly, decided never to go to bed before five o’clock in the morning.  In the depths of winter their servants spent the night in the street waiting for them, and with great difficulty kept themselves from freezing.  One night, or rather one morning, some one entered the room where these merry people spent their hours without knowing how time passed.  He found them quite alone; each of them was asleep in her arm-chair.] Ridicule, which public opinion dreads more than anything, is ever at hand to tyrannise, and punish.  It is only ceremony that makes us ridiculous; if we can vary our place and our pleasures, to-day’s impressions can efface those of yesterday; in the mind of men they are as if they had never been; but we enjoy ourselves for we throw ourselves into every hour and everything.  My only set rule would be this:  wherever I was I would pay no heed to anything else.  I would take each day as it came, as if there were neither yesterday nor to-morrow.  As I should be a man of the people, with the populace, I should be a countryman in the fields; and if I spoke of farming, the peasant should not laugh at my expense.  I would not go and build a town in the country nor erect the Tuileries at the door of my lodgings.  On some pleasant shady hill-side I would have a little cottage, a white house with green shutters, and though a thatched roof is the best all the year round, I would be grand enough to have, not those gloomy slates, but tiles, because they look brighter and more cheerful than thatch, and the houses in my own country are always roofed with them, and so they would recall to me something of the happy days of my youth.  For my courtyard I would have a poultry-yard, and for my stables a cowshed for the sake of the milk which I love.  My garden should be a kitchen-garden, and my park an orchard, like the one described further on.  The fruit would be free to those who walked in the orchard, my gardener should neither count it nor gather it; I would not, with greedy show, display before your eyes superb espaliers which one scarcely dare touch.  But this small extravagance would not be costly, for I would choose my abode in some remote province where silver is scarce and food plentiful, where plenty and poverty have their seat.

There I would gather round me a company, select rather than numerous, a band of friends who know what pleasure is, and how to enjoy it, women who can leave their arm-chairs and betake themselves to outdoor sports, women who can exchange the shuttle or the cards for the fishing line or the bird-trap, the gleaner’s rake or grape-gatherer’s basket.  There all the pretensions of the town will be forgotten,