My first visit was, as you will have no doubt guessed, to the Palais Royal: there I breakfasted, there I dined, and there I passed the whole day without the least _ennui_. It is a world in itself. It swarms at present with officers of the Allied army. The variety of uniforms adds to the splendour and novelty of the scene. The restaurants and cafés are filled with them. The Palais Royal is certainly the temple of animal gratification, the paradise of gastronomes. The officers are indulging in all sorts of luxury, revelling in Champaign and Burgundy, in all the pleasures of the belly, as well as _in iis quae sub ventre sunt_. 'Twill be a famous harvest for the restaurateurs and for the Cyprians who parade up and down the Arcades, sure of a constant succession of suitors. In fact, whatever be the taste of a man, whether sensual or intellectual or both, he can gratify himself here without moving out of the precincts of the Palais Royal. Here are cafés, restaurants, shops of all kinds whose display of clocks, jewellery, stuffs, silks, merchandize from all parts of the world, is most brilliant and dazzling; here you find reading-rooms where newspapers, reviews and pamphlets of all tongues, nations and languages are to be met with; here are museums of paintings, statues, plans in relief, cosmoramas; here are libraries, gaming houses, houses of fair reception; cellars where music, dancing and all kinds of orgies are carried on; exhibitions of all sorts, learned pigs, dancing dogs, military canary birds, hermaphrodites, giants, dwarf jugglers from Hindostan, catawbas from America, serpents from Java, and crocodiles from the Nile. Here, so Kotzebue has calculated, you may go through all the functions of life in one day and end it afterwards should you be so inclined. You may eat, drink, sleep, bathe, go to the _Cabinet d'aisance_, walk, read, make love, game and, should you be tired of life, you may buy powder and ball or opium to hasten your journey across Styx; or should you desire a more classic _exit_, you may die like Seneca opening your veins in a bath. Deep play goes forward day and night, and I verily believe there are some persons in Paris who never quit these precincts. The restaurants and cafés are most brilliantly fitted up. One, _Le Café des Mille Colonnes_, so called from the reflection of the columns in the mirrors with which the wainscoat is lined, boasts of a _limonadière_ of great beauty. She is certainly a fine woman, dresses very well, as indeed most French women do, and has a remarkably fine turned arm which she takes care to display on all occasions. I do not, however, perceive much animation in her; she always appears the same, nor has she made any more impression on me--tho' I am of a very susceptible nature in this particular--than a fine statue or picture would do. There she sits on a throne and receives the hommage and compliments of most of the visitors and the money of all, which seems to