"Everything in Paris is well combined with reference to external happiness. There is no restraint in the minutiæ of life; selfishness is at heart, but not in appearance; active interests occupy you every day, without much benefit, indeed, but certainly without the least tedium. A quickness of conception enables men to express and comprehend by a word what would elsewhere require a long explanation. An imitative spirit, which must, indeed, oppose all _true_ independence, gives their intercourse an accordant complaisance, nowhere to be found besides; in short, an easy manner of diversifying life and warding off reflection, without discarding the charms of intellect. To all these means of turning the brain, I must add their spectacles, and you will have some idea of the most social city in the world. I almost start at breathing its name in this hermitage, in the midst of a desert, and under impressions the extreme reverse of those which active population create; but I owe you a description of that place, and the effect it took upon myself. Can you believe, Corinne, gloomy and discouraged as you have known me, that I permitted myself to be seduced by this spirited whirlpool? I was pleased at having not a moment of _ennui_; it would have been well if I could have deadened my power of suffering, capable as I was of love. If I may judge by myself, I should say that a thoughtful and sensitive being may weary of his own intensity; and that which woos him from himself awhile does him a service. It is by raising me above myself, that you, Corinne, have dissipated my natural melancholy; it was by depreciating my real value, that a woman of whom I shall have soon to speak benumbed my internal sadness. Yet though I was infected by Parisian tastes, they would not long have detained me, had I not conciliated the friendship of a man, the perfect model of French character in its old loyalty, of French mind in its new cultivation. I shall not, my love, tell you the real names of the persons I must mention; you will understand why, when you have heard me to the end. Count Raimond, then, was of the most illustrious birth; he inherited all the chivalrous pride of his ancestors, and his reason adopted more philosophic ideas whenever they commanded a personal sacrifice; he had not mixed actively in the revolution, but loved what was virtuous in either party. Courage and gratitude on one side, zeal for liberty on the other: whatever was disinterested pleased him; the cause of all the oppressed seemed just to him; and this generosity was heightened by his perfect negligence of his own life. Not that he was altogether unhappy, but his mind was so contrasted with general society, that the pain he had daily felt there detached him from it entirely. I was so fortunate as to interest him; he sought to vanquish my natural reserve; and, for this purpose, embellished our friendship by little artifices perfectly romantic: he knew of no obstacles to his