At the same time, Paris wrought upon him something beneficially. Its numerical vastness--more forcibly expressed, by reason of the intenseness of its individual feeling, than that of London--amused him with a sense of his own insignificance; the conviction driven home into his mind, as he turned bewildered in a snow of pamphlets, that his profound theories of government were but childish essays in a craft, in the complicated ramifications of which there was not a street orator but left him miles behind, taught him a modesty to which he had been hitherto a part stranger. But he grew in self-reliance as he dwindled in self-sufficiency; and that was like exchanging fat for muscle--an admirable _quid pro quo_ in a city of gauntest shadows. To all the concentration of his faculties upon a seething pandemonium; to all his earnest efforts to record armies of fugitive impressions, and to interpret of their sum-total the nature of the force that set them in motion, Madame Gamelle acted, in unconscious humour, the part of chorus. “But, yes,” she would say; “the philosophers have proved the world misgoverned, and these that you see are the agents of the philosophers. They are travellers who trade in the article of truth. They teach the people to know themselves; that every one may have liberty of speech; that licence shall no longer be the privilege of aristocrats.” “And you would know yourself licentious, mother?” “As to that--do not ask me. I recognise it only for an admirable creed. My Zoïle would call it so. He looked to the time when he would be legally entitled to ignore the marriage vow. The poor _blondin_! He was a fine man, monsieur, but always unlucky. He died in the heyday of his hopes, leaving me the one precious pledge of his affection.” Then she would poke the little frowzy baby on her arm with a stunted finger, and nod to and address it in a strain of superfluous banter:-- “_Eh, mon p’tit godichon_! Thou wouldst teach me to know myself in thy little dirty face? Fie, then! Hast thou been seeking for my image or thine own in the basin of fine gravy soup I set aside for monsieur the lodger’s dinner?”