While at Buenos Aires, we had lived surrounded by men of action; we found at Rio a coterie composed almost exclusively of intellectuals—literary men, journalists, historians, philosophers, and jurists. Most of them were state officials and members of the Brazilian Academy,—an academy founded about ten years ago and modelled exactly on the lines of the Académie Française,—composed, like it, of forty members, elected in the same way, and admitted with the same ceremonial. In a small inn situated on the slopes of Corcovado, on the outskirts of the town and the forest, whose roads were shaded by secular trees, we lived for six weeks, just as Plato and his friends lived in the gardens of the Academy; discussing art, literature, philosophy, right, and morality with the friends whom Graça Aranha, the diplomatist and man of letters chosen by Baron di Rio Branco to do us the honours of Brazil, gathered round us almost daily. At no moment of my life have I felt myself so much detached from, and so superior to, the accustomed preoccupations which form the groundwork of ordinary existence in the modern world. And when I found myself living amongst persons for whom the culture of Europe represented the supreme blessing of life, the greatest pride of civilisation, for a moment I believed myself freed from that demon of American progress which had dogged me in Argentina. It was an illusion, however, which did not last long. Brazil is a country slightly older than Argentina. Owing to this reason, to its much greater size, to the variety of its climates and lands, which make it impossible to concentrate in a single city the direction of the whole of national life, and to other contingent reasons which it would take too long to enumerate here, Brazil has not developed in the last twenty years so rapidly as has Argentina. It has, however, developed much more quickly than any European country. I speedily saw that the rapidity of this progress was the great national pride of the Brazilians, even of those men of letters, philosophers, and writers, who professed to be such devoted disciples and admirers of Europe. In the same way the great national preoccupation was the acceleration, as far as possible, of the progress and increase of riches, and the exploiting and modernisation of the country, so that Brazil might not appear inferior in this particular to the other great states of America. An energetic administration had just finished the resanitation of Rio de Janeiro, destroying, at the cost of vast public works, all the breeding-places of yellow fever which up till then had infested it. The administration was then renovating it from top to bottom, opening streets and squares in the middle of the old quarters, constructing spacious promenades and gardens, and sumptuous public edifices, in a word, giving air and light and splendour and beauty to a city which was already beautiful in addition to being placed in a unique situation. I