_Eleven o’clock_.--The sea of vapor has risen and attacked the mountains, which for a long time overlooked it like so many huge reefs. For awhile it surged in vain over the lower slopes of the Alps. Then rolling back upon itself, it made a more successful onslaught upon the Jura, and now we are enveloped in its moving waves. The milky sea has become one vast cloud, which has swallowed up the plain and the mountains, observatory and observer. Within this cloud one may hear the sheep-bells ringing, and see the sunlight darting hither and thither. Strange and fanciful sight! The Hanoverian pianist has gone; the family from Colmar has gone; a young girl and her brother have arrived. The girl is very pretty, and particularly dainty and elegant in all her ways; she seems to touch things only with the tips of her fingers; one compares her to an ermine, a gazelle. But at the same time she has no interests, does not know how to admire, and thinks of herself more than of anything else. This perhaps is a drawback inseparable from a beauty and a figure which attract all eyes. She is, besides, a townswoman to the core, and feels herself out of place in this great nature, which probably seems to her barbarous and ill-bred. At any rate she does not let it interfere with her in any way, and parades herself on the mountains with her little bonnet and her scarcely perceptible sunshade, as though she were on the boulevard. She belongs to that class of tourists so amusingly drawn by Töpffer. Character: _naïve_ conceit. Country: France. Standard of life: fashion. Some cleverness but no sense of reality, no understanding of nature, no consciousness of the manifold diversities of the world and of the right of life to be what it is, and to follow its own way and not ours. This ridiculous element in her is connected with the same national prejudice which holds France to be the center point of the world, and leads Frenchmen to neglect geography and languages. The ordinary French townsman is really deliciously stupid in spite of all his natural cleverness, for he understands nothing but himself. His pole, his axis, his center, his all is Paris--or even less--Parisian manners, the taste of the day, fashion. Thanks to this organized fetishism, we have millions of copies of one single original pattern; a whole people moving together like bobbins in the same machine, or the legs of a single _corps d’armée_. The result is wonderful but wearisome; wonderful in point of material strength, wearisome psychologically. A hundred thousand sheep are not more instructive than one sheep, but they furnish a hundred thousand times more wool, meat, and manure. This is all, you may say, that the shepherd--that is, the master--requires. Very well, but one can only maintain breeding-farms or monarchies on these principles. For a republic you must have men: it cannot get on without individualities.