When I was with the Johnsons everything was superficial; and, as regards life, everything was brought down to the question of right and wrong. They were too didactic; art should never be didactic; and what is life but an art? Pater has said that so well, somewhere. With the Johnsons I am afraid I lost many opportunities; the tone was gray and cottony, I might almost say woolly. But now, as I tell you, I have determined to take right hold for myself; to look right into European life, and judge it without Johnsonian prejudices. I have taken up my residence in a French family, in a real Parisian house. You see I have the courage of my opinions; I don't shrink from carrying out my theory that the great thing is to _live_. You know I have always been intensely interested in Balzac, who never shrank from the reality, and whose almost _lurid_ pictures of Parisian life have often haunted me in my wanderings through the old wicked-looking streets on the other side of the river. I am only sorry that my new friends--my French family--do not live in the old city--_au coeur du vieux Paris_, as they say here. They live only in the Boulevard Haussman, which is less picturesque; but in spite of this they have a great deal of the Balzac tone. Madame de Maisonrouge belongs to one of the oldest and proudest families in France; but she has had reverses which have compelled her to open an establishment in which a limited number of travellers, who are weary of the beaten track, who have the sense of local colour--she explains it herself; she expresses it so well--in short, to open a sort of boarding-house. I don't see why I should not, after all, use that expression, for it is the correlative of the term _pension bourgeoise_, employed by Balzac in the _Pere Goriot_. Do you remember the _pension bourgeoise_ of Madame Vauquer _nee_ de Conflans? But this establishment is not at all like that: and indeed it is not at all _bourgeois_; there is something distinguished, something aristocratic, about it. The Pension Vauquer was dark, brown, sordid, _graisseuse_; but this is in quite a different tone, with high, clear, lightly-draped windows, tender, subtle, almost morbid, colours, and furniture in elegant, studied, reed-like lines. Madame de Maisonrouge reminds me of Madame Hulot--do you remember "la belle Madame Hulot?"--in _Les Barents Pauvres_. She has a great charm; a little artificial, a little fatigued, with a little suggestion of hidden things in her life; but I have always been sensitive to the charm of fatigue, of duplicity.