Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/64

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be infinitely happier there on small means than in London. So much beauty is provided for him gratis, that he must be a churl who can spend his time in moaning and whining because his private walls are undecorated, or costly carpets do not cover his floors. Let him go to the Louvre or Cluny Museum when the fit takes him, and count himself a king without the cost and care of sovereignty. Let him sit in the Tuileries, and call them his private gardens while he feeds the sparrows; let him loaf among the book-stalls of the Seine, and leisurely turn the pages of books he means not to buy. Where will he better such luxuries, even at his own price, if fortune stepped his way? In London, poverty is galling because there is no escape from its meannesses and its miseries. That is why the poor in London may be pardoned for taking to drink. That seems the only door, for it would need that a poor man living in a London slum should be very drunk indeed to find beauty of any kind in his environment. But poverty in Paris may be found both amusing and instructive. I am not sure that it is not the poor, the needy, the small clerk, the overworked teacher, the shop-girl, the underfed student, who do not get the best of Paris; feel to the fullest measure its common joys, which lie not in wait for the rich and worldly. These are in too great a hurry between their amusements and frivol-