French Language: teaching, 85; ignorance a misfortune, 149, 150; rare knowledge of, by Englishmen, 151, 152; letters by English ladies, 153; forms of courtesy, 157; prayers, 158; as the universal tongue, 158, 159; English knowledge of, 245; _univers_, 273, 274. (See _Languages_.) French People: excellence in painting, and relations to Americans and English, 7; an ideal of _good form_, 15; old conventionality, 16-18; love in fiction, 41; family ties, 63; proverb about cousins, 72; unbelieving sons, 93; bourgeois table manners formerly, 101, 102; state apartments, 105; incivility towards, at an English table, 106; girls, 106; a woman's clever retort, 107; literature condemned by wholesale, 147; royal daily life, 167; power of consolation, 182; examples of virtue, 208; old nobility, 209; Buffon and Littré, 209-211; _hazard providentiel_, 227; painters, 232, 233; overstatement, 234, 235; sociability with strangers contrasted with the English want of it (Essay XVII.), 239-252 _passim_; a widow and suite, 242, 243; discreet social habits, 247, 248; a disregard of titles, 248; a weak question about fortune, 259; ignorance of English matters, 265-270; wine-song, 268, 269; fuel and iron, 271, 272; seeming vanity of language, 273, 274; conceit cured by war, 278; communist dreamers, 284; proverb, 287; confusion of persons, 290.