if even most of them should, there are certainly many who do not, and
it is those you ought to have chosen for companions.
Is it not extraordinary, that you should fall into the very same error
in your behaviour, which you blame in the writings of the comic poets:
from which you say one would imagine Paris was peopled only by persons
of distinction. These are your constant theme, while those of your own
rank escape your notice; as if the ridiculous prejudices of nobility
had not cost you sufficiently dear, to make you hate them for ever; or
that you thought you degraded yourself in keeping company with honest
citizens and tradesmen, the most respectable order of men, perhaps in
the whole country. It is in vain you endeavour to excuse yourself, in
that yours are the acquaintance of Lord B----: with the assistance of
these, you might easily have made others of an inferior rank. So many
people are desirous to rise, that it is always easy to descend; and by
your own confession the only way, to come at the true manners of a
nation is to study the private life of the most numerous order among
them; for to confine your observations to those who only personate
assumed characters, is only to observe the actions of a company of
comedians.
I would have your curiosity exerted still farther. How comes it that,
in so opulent a city, the poor people are so miserable; while such
extreme distress is hardly ever experienced among us, where, on the
other hand, we have no examples of immense wealth? This question is,
in my opinion, well worth your asking; but it is not the people you
converse with that are to resolve it. It is in the splendid apartments
of the rich that the novice goes to learn the manners of the world;
but the man of sense and experience betakes himself to the cottages of
the poor. These are the places for the detection of those iniquitous
practices, that in polite circles are varnished over and hid beneath a
specious shew of words. It is here that the rich and powerful, by
coming to the knowledge of the basest arts of oppression, feel for the
unhappy what in public they only affect. If I may believe our old
officers, you will learn many things in the garrets of a fifth floor,
which are buried in profound silence at the _hotels_, in the suburbs
of St. Germain: you will find that many fine talkers would be struck
dumb, if all those they have made unhappy were present to contradict
their boasted pretensions to humanity.