I went down to the river to make my ablutions, and was about to commence this holy act, when a policeman threatened me with his _baton_. In looking at the water, I was consoled for the deprivation, as it had not the pure and limpid flow of our own Yu-ho, which runs by Pekin under the marble bridge of Pekiao. The Seine is a dirty yellow stream, which descends to the ocean for a bath. I shall wait until it comes back! I was told that Christians take a bath at home, which costs two francs. I called for one, and was furnished with an iron box, very much resembling the coffins in the cemetery of Ming-tang-y; one gets into them and lies upon the back, with the hands crossed upon the breast, like a true believer who has died in the faith of Fo. In Paris, each house is governed by a tyrant, who is called a porter. There are twenty thousand porters here, who make a million of inhabitants unhappy and desolate. They sometimes make a Revolution to overturn a poor devil, called a king; but they have never overturned the twenty thousand porters. Mine receives my orders with loud explosions of laughter, and when I threaten him, he says to me, “You are a Chinaman!” Since he thinks to insult me by calling me by the name of my country, I make the matter equal by crying, “And you are a Frenchman!” “_Render insult for insult_,” says the sage Menu. These things have most astonished me in Paris. My first duty (in quality of my rank in the Ming tang, the greatest society of _savans_ in the universe) has been to visit the Royal Library, renowned here as “a vast depot of all human knowledge.” This asylum of meditation, of reflection and study, is situated in the most noisy street in the city; the millions of books it contains shake continually with the passage of carriages and other vehicles. It is very much as if you and I should go for instruction between the bridge Tchoung-yu-Ho-Khias, where all the cats in Pekin are sold, and the street Toung-Kiang-mi-Kiang, where salutes are fired night and day! One of the librarians received me with great politeness, and offered me a chair. “Sir,” said I, in tolerable French, “I would be much obliged if you could lend me, for a few moments, the ‘History of the Dynasties of the Five Brothers Loung, and of the sixty-four Ché-ti’? You know that these glorious reigns commenced immediately after the third race of the first emperors—those of the Jin-Hoang, or the Emperors of Men, to distinguish them from the second race, called Ti-Hoang, or Emperors of the Earth.” The _savant_ did not appear as if he knew it. He put into his nose some of the forbidden opium, and after reflecting awhile, said, “Lao-yé, we have not that.” He appeared pleased to show me that he understood that “Lao-yé” was equivalent to “sir,” and repeated it a thousand times during our conversation.