your servant may go in search of vegetables, fruit, eggs, and fowls for the national pot-au-feu. It is a small luxury, however, which I do not recommend, though widely practised by the bourgeois, who has a positive genius for the slow and ingenious saving of sous.
It is for all these reasons, and thousands more that creep into the blood and the brain beyond the range of analysis, that Paris takes such a grip of the foreigner, and becomes the birth-town of his maturity. In other towns you sojourn as a stranger or a contemplator. You live apart, either in your own world of dreams, among old stones, ruins, and faded pictures, amid the dim aisles of Gothic poems, or else you form part of a foreign coterie, and give and go to afternoon teas, living like invaders, in insolent indifference to the natives around you, except in your appreciation of them should they be courteous enough to lend themselves to your notion of the picturesque, or treat you with the consideration and kindness you naturally deem yourself entitled to expect along the highways of Europe. But Paris will have none of this patronage. If you settle there it is inevitable that you will become Parisianised. I do not say anything so flattering as that your taste in dress, if you happen to be a woman, will, of necessity, become that of your adopted sister, but there will be a chance that her eye for colour will modify your barbaric indifference to
