Oddly enough, I hold that the pleasure side of Paris, its fashionable world, is the least of all to be envied. If I were a millionaire, I think I should prefer London, with its larger public life, its more varied hospitalities, for the investing of my millions in the thing called experience. Even a British ass, with time on his hands, and millions to squander, can discover an original method of going to the dogs and casting his millions into the bottomless pit. But what can the French idiot do after he has sent his shirts to London to be washed, and invested in an automobile? He is such a superlative dandy and humbug—I would fain use a hideous word, which describes him still better in three letters, if it were not for its inexcusable offensiveness—that he cannot bring sincerity to bear upon his imaginary passion for sport, and looks ten times more absurd when he is playing the athlete than when he is contentedly playing the fool. He is “the sedulous ape,” not to literature, like Stevenson in his young days, but to the Anglo-Saxon; and the folly lasts on to the brink of age. The Faubourg holds itself more aloof than ever. It is now not even on saluting terms with the Republic. Still its life must be lived after a fashion, and it must give balls, if for no other reason than the ignoring of ministers and their wives. It cannot be said that the country at large is much affected by its doings; and if we are to judge the inhabitants by the fiction of the day,—the dialogue novels of Gyp, of Lavedan, of Abel Hermant, the psychological studies of MM. Bourget, Hervieu, Prévost,—the sane and intelligent person may thank his stars that he is still free to choose his society, and is not condemned by an accident of birth to tread such a mill of vaporous frivolity and futility, of intellectual blankness and arrogance, and of senseless corruption. I do not presume to say that these clever writers are invariably accurate in their delineation of fashionable Paris, nor do I deny that there may be a good deal of exaggeration in their sombre and revolting pictures,—for what lies under the sparkling effervescence of the brightest and wittiest of Gyp’s earlier work if it is not a dead-level of inanity and perversity? But their singularity consists in the fact that all are unanimous in their conclusions, in the general tenor of the life they portray. Pride of birth is the only sort of pride this class seems to possess, and for a nod the heroines of all those heraldic pages fall into the arms of the first comer and the last alike. When you make the acquaintance of a viscount, you may be sure he has an _entresol_ somewhere for varied clandestine loves, and passes his time between encounters here, _le boxe_, and his “circle.” One solid, useful action never seems to be entered to his account. His days and nights are devoted to accomplished idleness and seduction, and his busiest hours are those spent on his toilet.