I do not say I was not as much or more to blame. Had I teazed him, he would no doubt have made an effort to get me out of Longueville into some calling in England. To speak the truth, I liked my life so well that I had no wish to change. Monotony has its fascination. We cling to dulness after many years of habitude. Don’t you know people who have, to your certain knowledge, made up their minds for the last ten years to leave the place they live in? Year after year the same story is told--how they hate the society; how inhospitable the neighbours are; how low the town has become since their day: how every stone in every street is as familiar to them as their faces; how unspeakably nauseating the people who live opposite, and who overlook all their internal doings, make life by the sickening regularity of their habits. But your grumbling friends still go on living in the same place; and all they do, and all they probably ever will do, is to amuse their resolution to quit with fictitious inspections of houses they don’t mean to take, and occasional applications for lists to distant house-agents, with whom they have not the slightest intention of transacting any business. Over and over again I would say, “I’d give anything to get out of this hole;” and no man’s voice more loudly swelled the residential chorus of abuse against Longueville than mine. But I never meant what I said. In the depths of my soul dwelt a very pathetic love for our apartments, with the faded velvet furniture and ghastly skeleton clock and antique mirrors, over Auguste Soulier’s the bootmaker’s shop in the Rue d’Enghien; for the pastry-cook’s opposite, where, when a boy, I would spend my pocket-money in _pistaches_ and tarts, and where, when grown too nice for raw sweetmeats and jam, I would dawdle over Vanilla ices; for the billiard table in the Café Grenouille over whose worn cloth I have stooped with an enthusiasm that, directed into a money-making channel, would have earned me a good income; for the whist tables in the club-room, where, amid volumes of smoke from cigars, at fifty centimes apiece, I would make or lose during a long evening as much as ten sous. And shall I ever forget--oh, fond and foolish heart, be still!--shall I ever forget thee, sweet Pauline Gautier--remind me, was thy father a dancing-master, or did he keep a school? Thee, I say, whom on summer evenings I would row in a boat on the amber-coloured river, filling the intervals of the measured music of my oars with tender breathings, surely not the less delightful for thee to hear because I whispered them in French, not always strictly grammatical?