"I am Parisian to the back-bone, and as thoroughly a man about town as it is possible for any human being to be. I had scarcely left Paris, last summer, to go to Trouville, at my doctor's suggestion, for fear of cholera, indeed I had not got beyond Maison-Lafitte, before I was tempted to take a return train. By the time I reached Nantes I was restless and uneasy, and I would have given anything if I could have set eyes on the steps of Tortoni's. At Elbeuf I was a prey to the deepest dejection, and everybody else in the carriage seemed to be similarly affected. You would have thought it was a mourning coach, bringing back from the cemetery a cargo of rightful heirs disinherited by the defunct. At Serquigny the refreshment-room failed to charm. I absolutely refused to go into it. I did not want anything and, if I had, I could not have taken it, for my stomach was as dejected as my heart. The sight of the pastures of Liseaux and the cattle grazing on the plain gave fresh impulse to my melancholy. The silence, the calm, the repose of nature affected my nerves, and my agitation became extreme. My fellow passengers grew uneasy and huddled together in alarm. When I arrived at Trouville, I rushed into my room at the hotel, closed the shutters so that I might not catch sight of the sea, and burst into a flood of tears. I need scarcely tell you that on the following morning I left for Paris by the first train, and that I told the cholera it might seize on me, do whatever it liked with me, on condition that it did not banish me from Paris. "Say what you like, my dear fellows, I simply cannot do without those wretched Boulevards, which commence at the Madeleine and end just before you come to the Rue da Faubourg-Montmartre. They are dusty, dirty, smoky—I admit all that. In the summer my boots are incrusted with the asphalte which melts under my feet. In the winter I flounder about in a mass of sticky mud, which is at the same time as slippery as ice. At all seasons of the year the gas lamps shed around their sickly light. The trees weep in vain for leaves, but I have been accustomed ever since my birth and theirs to the sight of their trunks alone, and I should be annoyed if they afforded any shade, for then they would not be my trees.