...I have been admitted to the intimacy of a family here named G----, who keep a hotel and restaurant. Immense, bulky, garrulous, kind-hearted woman, father with thick red face, little eyes and snow-white hair, two daughters of about twenty. The whole conversation and tea-taking there reminded me so exactly of Erckmann-Chatrian's stories that I wanted to get a stenographer and a photographer to take them down. The great, thick remarks, all about housekeeping and domestic economy of some sort or other; the jokes; the masses of eatables, from the awful swine soup (tasting of nothing I could think of but the perspiration of the animal and which the terrible mother forced me to gulp down by accusing me, whenever I grew pale and faltered, of not relishing their food), through the sausages (liver sausages, blood sausages, and more), to the beer and wine; then the masses of odoriferous cheese, which I refused in spite of all attacks, entreaties and accusations, and then heard, oh, horrors! with somewhat the feeling I suppose with which a criminal hears the judge pass sentence of death upon him,--then heard an order given for some more sausages to be brought in to me instead; the air of religious earnestness with which the eating of the father was talked about, how the mother told the daughter not to give him so much wine, because he never enjoyed his beer so much after it, while he with his silver spectacles and pointing with his pudgy forefinger to the lines, read out of the newspaper half aloud to himself; the immense long room with walls of dark wood, the big old-fashioned china stove at each end of it, etc., etc.,--all brought up the _Taverne du Jambon de Mayence_ into my mind.... [W. J.] * * * * * The water-cure at Teplitz worked no cure; but James repaired to Heidelberg in the spring, to hear Helmholtz lecture and with the hope of following the medical courses during the summer semester. Once more he had to stop work, and for a while he returned to Berlin. From there he traveled by way of Geneva, stopping characteristically for only the very briefest of glances at the familiar scenes of his school-days, and hurrying on to spend the latter part of the summer at another watering-place, Divonne in Savoy. The following brief letter seems to have been written there, and is interesting as a first reference to Charles Renouvier, a French philosopher who later exercised an important influence on James's thinking. _To his Father._ [DIVONNE?], _Oct. 5, 1868_.