He might, perhaps, be spared, for our country is not yet sufficiently advanced to give such a philosopher fair-play. In London, as yet, there are no blessed _Bureaux de Mariage_, where an old bachelor may have a charming young maiden--for his money; or a widow of seventy may buy a gay young fellow of twenty, for a certain number of bank-billets. If _mariages de convenance_ take place here (as they will wherever avarice, and poverty, and desire, and yearning after riches are to be found), at least, thank God, such unions are not arranged upon a regular organised _system_: there is a fiction of attachment with us, and there is a consolation in the deceit (‘the homage,’ according to the old _môt_ of Rochefoucauld, ‘which vice pays to virtue’); for the very falsehood shows that the virtue exists somewhere. We once heard a furious old French colonel inveighing against the chastity of English _demoiselles_: ‘Figurez-vous, sir,’ said he (he had been a prisoner in England), ‘that these women come down to dinner in low dresses, and walk out alone with the men!’--and, pray Heaven, so may they walk, fancy-free in all sorts of maiden meditations, and suffer no more molestation than that young lady of whom Moore sings, and who (there must have been a famous lord-lieutenant in those days) walked through all Ireland, with rich and rare gems, beauty, and a gold ring on her stick, without meeting or thinking of harm. Now, whether Monsieur de Viel-Castel has given a true picture of the Faubourg St. Germain, it is impossible for most foreigners to say; but some of his descriptions will not fail to astonish the English reader; and all are filled with that remarkable _naïf_ contempt of the institution called marriage, which we have seen in M. de Bernard. The romantic young nobleman of Westphalia arrives at Paris, and is admitted into what a celebrated female author calls _la crême de la crême de la haute volée_ of Parisian society. He is a youth of about twenty years of age. ‘No passion had as yet come to move his heart, and give life to his faculties; he was awaiting and fearing the moment of love; calling for it, and yet trembling at its approach; feeling, in the depths of his soul, that that moment would create a mighty change in his being, and decide, perhaps, by its influence, the whole of his future life.’ Is it not remarkable that a young nobleman, with these ideas, should not pitch upon a _demoiselle_, or a widow, at least? but no, the rogue must have a married woman, bad luck to him; and what his fate is to be is thus recounted by our author, in the shape of A FRENCH FASHIONABLE CONVERSATION