The life of fashion in Paris is pretty much the same as the life of fashion elsewhere. Men and women ride in the Bois in the early hours, and it must be admitted that they could not find a pleasanter spot to ride in anywhere. The landscape is charming, and if you break away from the Allée des Acacias—the Parisian Row—you may even make a feint at losing yourself under columns of tall trees, by little, moss-grown paths, where the branches meet overhead, with ever in view grassy rolls of sward and bright trellises of foliage above the broad white roads. In the early hours this trim paradise is cool and quiet; and even an Anarchist on foot will have no cause to envy his prosperous enemy on horseback, for the same delights of herb and leaf, of sky and water, are his at a cheaper rate. Indeed, there is no land on earth where a good-humoured taste of vicarious pleasures may be so freely and fully enjoyed as in France. Amiable _petits gens_ sit on chairs and watch the great parade of the Bois without a trace of envy in their looks, comment on dresses, horses, equipages, bearing, as if it were but a pageant got up for their benefit. I am not sure that this is not one of the advantages of Society—one of its objects—to minister to the kindly and generous vanity of the workers of a country. These, by their labours, maintain it, dress it, wash for it, build for it, manufacture for it, keep in order for it the public roads, give the best of their blood, brains, nerve, and force to its triumphs, and are content to see how well the result of all this gigantic travail of a race looks in the show hours of national existence. The big dressmakers are repaid when, sitting in their _loge_ of inspection, they watch the effect of their several creations on Varnishing Day, at Auteuil or Longchamps. The artistic temperament is at the root of all this contentedness, of these subtle gratifications which the Philistine workman does not apprehend. The Frenchman brings this sentiment of art into all he does. The word “artist” is applied to cook, dressmaker, milliner, hair-dresser. In many ways M. Demolins has shown us that the race is inferior to the Anglo-Saxon races, but it has one essential superiority—the absence of vulgarity in the artisan and shopkeeping classes. You can hold converse with pleasure and profit with your washerwoman, who also will, in all probability, be something of an artist, with the artist’s personal point of view; with your char-woman, your hair-dresser; and the grocer’s boy on his daily rounds, if you come in contact with him, you will find to be an intelligent and well-mannered youth. It is only when you get a little above this class that you light upon a trace of commercial vulgarity. The _commis voyageur_ is something of a trial on the public road. He is not a pattern of manners, and he is apt to be aggressive in his desire to obtain the value of his money. Go still higher, among the wealthy bourgeois, and in