The expenses of those who can afford to live largely are the same in both countries. Comfort, in the ideal English degree, is not less costly than luxury, though a careful analysis of details would prove that it is not precisely the same thing. CHAPTER III LUXURY [Sidenote: Want of a common Standard.] It is most difficult to fix any common standard of luxury in two different nations. In a single nation the question whether an indulgence may be considered luxurious or not is settled by the national public opinion. There is no public opinion common to France and England. [Sidenote: Difficulty of Definition.] Even the definition of the word “luxury” is not so easy as it seems. In practice, people define it for themselves according to their own characters. An austere person would condemn as luxury what another would call “comfort;” a very luxurious person would be proud of luxury as a proof of taste and cultivation. [Sidenote: Littré’s Definition.] [Sidenote: Lafaye’s Definition.] Littré defined luxury (_luxe_) as “magnificence in dress, in the table, in furniture, an abundance of sumptuous things.” He made a curious distinction between luxury and sumptuousness. In his opinion sumptuousness expressed the costliness of things, whilst luxury was the taste for what is sumptuous. Lafaye, in his valuable dictionary of French synonyms, carried out the same idea further in the region of morals. He said that luxury might belong to all conditions of life, whereas magnificence and sumptuousness can only belong to lofty positions. In Lafaye’s opinion luxury is a fault or a vice which consists in the want of simplicity, or in offending against simplicity in one’s manner of living, or in his way of doing things, or of showing himself. Magnificence and splendour in great personages or in great cities are not vices, according to Lafaye, but the expression of generosity and grandeur. [Sidenote: Cheap Pleasures not considered Luxurious.] In private life the idea of luxury is connected more nearly with expense than with enjoyment. Very cheap things are not considered luxuries, though they may be delightful. A shepherd on a hillside has access to a cool fountain, and in a hot summer he delights in drinking the water and in resting under the shade of the trees. These are clearly enjoyments of sense, and exquisite enjoyments, but they are not luxuries for the shepherd. Iced water and green shade are luxuries in the heart of Paris. In a good fruit year peaches, however delicious, are not luxuries in central France, neither was wine in the happy times before the phylloxera. The former abundance of wine has led to the free employment of it in French cookery. This always strikes English people as luxurious. [Sidenote: Necessaries fixed by Custom.]