"The French, it must be allowed, understand and practise the art of living independently. They find you furnished apartments according to your own taste and means--comfortable, handsome, or gorgeous--in any part of the city or its environs. In your rooms you may either breakfast, dine, and sup, or take only your coffee there, and dine at a restaurant. This is to me, a bird of passage, and desirous of taking a bird's-eye view of things, a delightful mode of living. Paris is filled with restaurants and cafés of all sorts and sizes, where you may obtain your 'provant,' as Captain Dalgetty would style it, at what price you please, from the humble sum of a few sous up to the emptying of a well-lined purse. Ladies, gentlemen, and whole families may be seen at these places, enjoying their repast, and the utmost order and decorum prevail. Some of these cafés are magnificently furnished. I breakfasted in one yesterday the furniture and decorations of the salon of which cost eighty thousand francs. Another agreeable thing in Paris is, that you may one moment be in the midst of fashion, pomp, and all the hollowness of the flattering crowd, and the next buried in the sincere quiet of your own chamber, your very existence blotted from the memories of those with whom, the unsophisticated might have imagined, your society was of the utmost consequence. I say this is pleasant when properly understood and appreciated. All that is required of you is the superficial courtesy of life, which costs a well-bred man nothing; and in return you have a well-dissembled friendship, looking like truth, but which they would not have you to cherish as a reality for the world. The sentiments of the heart are quite too dull and too troublesome for their mercurial temperament; and hence you seldom hear of a Frenchman's having a false friend." The professional bias which so strongly dominated among the associations in the mind of Forrest led him very early after his arrival in the French metropolis, to visit the tomb of Talma. Carrying a fresh laurel crown under his cloak, he sought out the consecrated place among the crowd of undistinguished graves, reverently laid his tribute there, and lingered long in meditation on the career, the genius, the renown of the greatest stage-actor of France, and the lessons to be learned from his life and character by ambitious successors in his art. Thus, like Byron at the grave of Churchill, did the player draw his profitable homily from "the glory," though, unlike the morbid bard, he did not think of "the nothing, of a name."