It is not, therefore, at the crowded roll-calls of all their acquaintance that I would look for anything rational or peculiar in the _salons_ of Paris, but in the daily and constant intercourse of familiar companionship. This is enjoyed with a degree of pleasant ease--an absence of all pomp, pride, and circumstance, of which unhappily we have no idea. Alas! we must know by special printed announcement a month beforehand that our friend is "at home,"--that liveried servants will be in attendance, and her mansion blazing with light,--before we can dare venture to pass an evening hour in her drawing-room. How would a London lady stare, if some half-dozen--though perhaps among the most chosen favourites of her visiting-list--were to walk unbidden into her presence, in bonnets and shawls, between the hours of eight and eleven! And how strangely new would it seem, were the pleasantest and most coveted engagements of the week, formed without ceremony and kept without ostentation, to arise from a casual meeting at the beginning of it! It is this ease, this habitual absence of ceremony and parade, this national enmity to constraint and tediousness of all kinds, which renders the tone of French manners so infinitely more agreeable than our own. And the degree in which this is the case can only be guessed at by those who, by some happy accident or other, possess a real and effective "open sesame!" for the doors of Paris. With all the superabundance of vanity ascribed to the French, they certainly show infinitely less of it in their intercourse with their fellow-creatures than we do. I have seen a countess, whose title was of a dozen fair descents, open the external door of her apartment, and welcome the guests who appeared at it with as much grace and elegance as if a triple relay of tall fellows who wore her colours had handed their names from hall to drawing-room. Yet in this case there was no want of wealth. Coachman, footman, abigail, and doubtless all fitting etceteras, owned her as their sovereign lady and mistress. But they happened to have been sent hither and thither, and it never entered her imagination that her dignity could be compromised by her appearing without them. In short, the vanity of the French does not show itself in little things; and it is exactly for this reason that their enjoyment of society is stripped of so much of the anxious, sensitive, ostentatious, self-seeking etiquette which so heavily encumbers our own.