The English institution of lunch, to which any friend may come uninvited, is a great practical help to social intercourse in the country. It is pleasant from the absence of state and pretension, both in host and guest, and it gives a convenient excuse for paying a long call in the middle of the day. There is nothing answering to it in France. You must be very intimate indeed with a French family before you could venture to “_demander à déjeuner_;” in fact, that is hardly possible without relationship. It is astonishing, to an Englishman, how very much of French social intercourse is absolutely limited to the formal call between three and six in the afternoon. People go on calling upon each other in that way for all their lives without an invitation on either side. [Sidenote: Invitations to sleep.] Another great difference between France and England concerns invitations to sleep. In England, all your friends’ houses are open to you. It would not occur to an Englishman to go to the hotel in a town where he had intimate friends. In France the narrowness of town lodgings acts as an effectual preventive to this kind of hospitality, except amongst the very rich, and so the habit of it is lost. This is one of those small matters which have great consequences. The most unrestrained social intercourse in England takes place when guests are staying in a house, and the most valuable moments for the interchange of masculine confidences occur very late at night. [Sidenote: Increase of Luxury an Impediment to Hospitality.] I have said elsewhere that the increase of luxury in France acts as a restraint upon hospitality. People shrink from the disturbance, the trouble, and the expense of the state dinner, and so they end by giving no dinners at all. In former times hospitality was more a thing of the heart than of the purse, more of gaiety than ceremony, and was so common as to be a weekly, and in some houses almost a daily habit. Now it is a solemn function occurring at rare intervals. [Sidenote: Want of Intercourse amongst the French Peasantry.] My attention has been drawn by the French themselves to the decline of hospitality amongst the peasantry. I believe that this varies greatly in different parts of France. So far as I have been able to observe, the peasants never invite each other except to marriage-feasts, and then their hospitality is excessive and extravagant. In my neighbourhood, not only do the peasants abstain from invitations, they do not even meet for an evening’s chat in each other’s houses. The farm-houses may be a mile from each other by measurement; socially, they are a hundred miles apart. [Sidenote: The Club and the _Cercle_.]