When you pay a visit, go away rather too soon than too late; leave people always a little hungry of your company; unless you are of the class of ladies, who “make hungry where most they satisfy.”
I advise you in your dress not to follow too implicitly the fashions of Europe, and especially not to exaggerate, which is so common with imitators. In bowing with the reverence to French fashions, which is becoming in all womankind, have a decent respect to the human shapes and appearances. Why, I have seen bustles or bishops, or what do you call them, put up even in Chestnut-street by some of you, who, under the Rump Parliament, would have been taken up for a libel.
If you are well dressed, no one meeting you will ask who made your frock. One stares at the woman, and the frock is unseen. Do you believe that any one asks Madame la Hon who made her chapeau; or the pretty Countess de Vaudrueil, or the Duchess de Guiche, who plaited those diamonds, more beautiful than the starry firmament, upon their turbans; or the Duchess de Plaisance who made her shoe? No, no, the heart is full of the little foot, and there is no room there for the shoemakers and mantua-makers.
Don’t do things always the same way. If, for example, you hand a gentleman anything (a bit of anthracite of the “Peacock Vein,” or a joint of the railroad) do it with a graceful simplicity. I know an elegant of your village, polished, to be sure, only with coal-dust, who always brings his hand inconveniently to his heart as the starting-place, and then sets off in a beautiful hyperbola, and always with a velocity geometrically progressive. Do you be various; look sometimes beautiful; look sometimes well, and fore Haven’s sake, if you can, look sometimes ugly. She who wears a pretty cap every day, because it is a pretty cap, is “the cap of all the fools.”
In Paris scandal is reduced to a minimum, for two reasons; first, from the variety of events;—a large city swallows at a meal, what would feed your towns for a whole month: and secondly, because what we call breaking three or four of the commandments is here no sin. As for elopements there are none; no occasion to run away.
News and coffee are taken usually together, and both must be hot. It is low breeding to talk of anything which happened three days ago; the news of the last week is the last year’s almanack. A Parisian gentleman never speaks but of great events, and those which are just born; nor does he rashly speak of Racine or Corneille, or such like antiquated authors; it smacks of the Provinces.
To be an exquisite, the qualifications are to talk of the opera and the races, and play at whist, dine at the Cercle des Etrangers, make a leg, walk in a quadrille, and avoir la plus jolie maitresse de Paris. It also recommends one greatly to have a pale face, and emaciated shanks; implying a long course of high living; besides it gives a modish languor to one’s air; it is exceedingly genteel. It is understood of course, that one must be a useful man about a woman, and have one’s pocket stuffed with her little conveniences. If she wants a pin, his pincushion is at her service; or a needle, he must have all the numbers from six to a dozen.
To be a gentleman of the bon ton, it is necessary not to be suspected of any useful employment, or of regulating life by any rule of order or economy; above all, not to be without some intrigue. Three or four persons should always be jealous of one at the same time.
With a moderate pair of whiskers and mustachios, with a little tuft on the inferior lip, and all trimmed like the garden of Versailles, he is a classic; but if you see a grisly monster, with the beard of a Scotch boar, and his hair flowing in all its St. Simonian shagginess about his shoulders, and with the sallow complexion of a quateroon, seated by the side of a smooth and elegant female, of an afternoon in the Tuileries, he is of the romantic school—I wonder you women don’t set your faces against these beards!
Gentlemen smoke now in Europe every where, but chew and spit nowhere. I have observed that the French Exchange, where several thousand persons daily congregate upon a white marble floor, is always pure from the contamination of spitting. The French are, however, often disagreeable, by spitting in their handkerchiefs. The best model, they say, in such matters, is an English gentleman. The ancient Persians were a still better. An Englishman often gets into good, sometimes bad customs, from a pure antigallic opposition, as Lord Burleigh turned out his toes, because Sir Christopher Hatton turned his in.