“It is a pity,” said I in a pique, “that nature had not taken some of the pains she has lavished upon your brains and your beauty, to give to your heart. You see a stranger, never before a traveller, wandering in your country——”
“A stranger never before a traveller is not to my taste. Such a traveller’s views of human nature are very narrow. He judges of merit always by some mode or fashion of his own, and sets up his whims as the standard of propriety for others. One who has travelled does not think a fellow-creature bad because she may deviate from the little etiquette of his native village. He does not think any thing wrong that is not so essentially. If he should meet for example, a lady, an entire stranger, who would ask his arm, to see these fine pictures of the Louvre; in the alternative of remaining out of doors, and should choose, in return for his politeness, to be entertained an hour with his company, he would not infer that she wanted either sense or good breeding; he would not presume, on such appearances, to treat her with less respect—much less——”
I dropped the hand I had taken without her leave. She then returned it, and bade me adieu, crossing the bridge and traversing the Quai de La Monnaie, where she disappeared among the narrow lanes of St. Germain—and there was an end of her.
I intended in setting out to give you the cream of her conversation, but it turns out to be the skim-milk only, and I have no time for revision. There is nothing so insipid and creamless as the fine things people say to one’s self, and especially the fine things one says in reply.
This, with a little package of music, will be handed you by Mr. D——, who is going to accompany it all the way himself. The obliging man! Please to give him your thanks; and to his prettiest little wife in the world, a thousand compliments from your very devoted humble servant.
LETTER XV.
The Schools.—State of Literature.—Minister of Public Instruction.—Education in France.—Prussian System.—Parochial Schools.—Normal Schools.—Institutions of Paris.—Public Libraries.—Machinery of French Justice.—The Judges.—Eloquence of the Bar.—Medicine.—Corporations of Learning.—Their Evils.—The French Institute.—Pretended New System of Instruction.—Professors of Paris.
Paris, November 20th, 1835.
One of the eminent merits of the French character is the distinction they bestow upon letters. A literary reputation is, at once, a passport to the first respect in private life, and to the first honours in the state. In Paris it gives the tone, which it does nowhere else, to fashionable society. It is not that Paris loves money less than other cities, but she loves learning more; and that titled rank being curtailed of its natural influence, learning has taken the advance, and now travels on in the highway to distinction and preferment, without a patron, and without a rival. At the side of him, whose blood has circulated through fifty generations, or has stood in the van of as many battles, is the author of a French History, born without a father or mother.
Who is Guizot, and who Villemain, Cousin, Collard, Arago, Lamartine, that they should be set up at the head of one of the first nations in Europe? Newspaper editors, schoolmasters, astronomers, and poets, who have thrust the purpled nobles, and time-honoured patricians from the market of public honours, and have sat down quietly in their seats. The same marks of literary supremacy are seen through every feature of the community. Who was at Madame Recamier’s last night? Chateaubriand; and at the Duchesse d’Abrantes? Chateaubriand.—At the Pantheon, the whole nave of the Temple is assigned to two literary men; and the Prince of Eckmuhl, and such like, are crammed into the cellar. At Père la Chaise, David wears the cross of St. Louis, by the side of Massena. Molière is the only author in the world since the Greeks, whose birth-day is a national festival. His statue is crowned on that day at the Theatre Français, and his plays are represented, by order of government, upon all the national theatres. We ought then to presume that the literary and scientific institutions of the French should correspond with this sentiment in favour of learning; and so they do.