The weeks of getting a hearing acquaintance with the language were spent in reading sociology at the Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève, exchanging conversation with students at the Sorbonne, and attending still not understood lectures, in the hope that some day the electric spark of apprehension might flash. I soon felt an intellectual vivacity, a sincerity and candor, a tendency to think emotions and feel ideas, that integrated again the spiritual world as I knew it, and wiped out those irrelevances and facetiousnesses and puzzle-interests and sporting attitudes towards life, that so got on one’s nerves in England. Here was also a democracy, not a society all shot into intellectual and social castes, where one lived shut in with ideas and attitudes that, like the proverbial ostrich, annihilated the rest of the world. In England, unless you were a “social reformer,” you did not know anything about anybody but your own class; in France there seemed to be scarcely any social reformers, but everybody assumed an intelligent interest in everything. In short, a democracy, where you criticized everything and everybody, and neither attempted to “lift” the “lower orders” nor “ordered yourself lowly and reverently towards your betters.” There was a solid, robust air of equality, which one felt in no other country, certainly not our own. The labor movement had an air of helping itself, and its leaders showed an intellectuality that ranked them with the professional men. In fact, the distinction between the “intellectual” and the non-intellectual seems to have quite broken down in France. Manners, styles of speech, pronunciation, ideas, the terms in which things are phrased, seem to flow rather freely over all the classes. Class-distinctions, which hit you in the face in England and America--I mean, differences of manner and speech, attitudes of contempt or admiration for other types--are much blurred. The language has remained simple, pure, usable without the triteness and vulgarity which dogs English, and which constitutes the most subtle evidence of our inherent Anglo-Saxon snobbery. It was a new world, where the values and the issues of life got reinstated for me into something of their proper relative emphasis.