new hotel in the Champs Elysées. He wanted
to buy an historical mansion, with the probable
intention of assuming the owner's name, and had
written to our notary to treat for the purchase.
When the visitor entered the court of the
hotel, a bevy of red-waistcoated grooms were
rubbing down some half-dozen English horses.
After mounting a marble staircase lighted by a
colossal gilded lantern, he found in the vestibule
a valet de chambre, with white cravat and full-
blown calves, who introduced him to an immense
glazed gallery lined with camellias and greenhouse
plants. Some secret ennui hovered in
the atmosphere; at the first step, you breathed
a sort of vapour of opium. You walked between
a double row of perches tenanted by parrots of
different nations. There were red, blue, green,
grey, yellow, and white; but all were pining
with nostalgia. At the extremity of the gallery
there was a little table standing in front of a
Renaissance chimney-piece; for at that time,
the master breakfasted alone, always alone, off
a roll and a cup of chocolate; his stomach
already was beginning to rebel. After inflicting
a quarter of an hour's suspense, he condescended
to make his appearance. This six or seven
times millionnaire was a once-young man with
a nose awry. His eyes lacked lustre and he
carried Night on his countenance. He had
been improvising millions at the Bourse for
scarcely four years, and had already exhausted
all the curiosities of pleasure. Nothing was
able to stir his nerves. Champagne, to him,
was mere spiritless froth. He yawned, dozed,
seemed to be always dozing; he walked like one
who walks in his sleep. His spleen had infected
the walls of his hotel. The parrots looked like
his detached thoughts, embodied and fixed on
perches. With him, no sympathy with art or
thought; not a book, not a picture. Once he
went so far as to buy a museum of things to be
kept under lock and key, or better, burnt. And
this is all for which that man had devoured at
the Bourse the patrimony of three or four
hundred families. Think what an expense of
corruption must be incurred, to stir the soul of
this used-up financier!

He mistook the way to happiness, which
exists only in the mind and through the mind.
When a man, abandoned by the divinity within
him, demands of his riches the fugitive joys of the
senses instead of the inexhaustible pleasures of
thought and conscience, he interrogates matter
in vain; he can only draw from it the gloomy
melancholy of Sardanapalus and Tiberius.

Our Provincial remarks that France has always
been timorous. An occasional consequence of fear
is ferocity: a constant one, stupidity. He was
one day dining with a gentleman six feet high,
with two thousand a year in woods and vineyards.
When coffee came in, some one spoke of the
expedition to Mexico, and mentioned that he
had lost a friend from the yellow fever.

"Monsieur," dryly interrupted the host,
"there has never been any yellow fever in
Mexico." He immediately shut the door of
the saloon and closed the window-shutters. He
doubtless feared that the outside air had
overheard the conversation, and would denounce him
as a traitor to the state.

One evening, a witty cornet-à-piston, who is
fond of his joke, entered the Passage Choiseul
in company with a friend. " You see all these
blazing shops," he said, " and all these noodles
staring in at the windows. Shall I make them
all disappear in the twinkling of an eye? Stop
there a moment, and take particular care not
to laugh." Before his companion had time to
reply, he advanced into the passage shaking
both his fists, and shouting at the top of his
voice, " What are you doing here? Haven't
you read the ordonnance which orders people to
go home at ten o'clock? Leave instantly, or I
will have you all arrested." There then passed
over the crowd, which was lounging about with
drowsy step, as it were a sort of gust of wind,
which swept them before it like dry leaves in
autumn. Before you could say Jack Robinson,
the gallery was empty. The frightened shop-
keepers put up their shutters. In another
minute the gas was turned off, and the passage
as silent as the grave.

The cornet-à-piston, pointing to the gallery,
then all silent and dark, quietly remarked,
"After this, who will presume to say that the
French are not a governable people?"

To love, is the perfectioning of man's moral
nature. But what do we mean by loving? Is
it to wander from door to door, to have and
never to hold, to be incessantly tying together a
bouquet which is as incessantly untied, and then
to toss it carelessly into the stream? That is
not love, but vagabondage. True love consists
in taking a woman by the hand, to live beside
the same hearth in indissoluble intimacy, mutually
sworn and consecrated, with no thought of
ever separating. Love, so conceived, is
marriage. But what is marriage? Our Notary's
experience enables him to answer the question.

A man, frequently an old man, selects a girl,
and conducts her with great pomp and a veil on
her head, to a spot designated for that sort of
ceremony, before a functionary wearing a scarf
round his waist. And there, after summary
interrogation of their christian and surnames, the
municipal pontiff takes a civil code out of his
pocket, wipes his spectacles, and in a more or
less irreproachable tone of voice, according to
the patois of the neighbourhood, he reads a
paragraph, nearly as follows:

"You, conjoint, promise protection to your
conjointe; and you, conjointe, promise obedience
to your conjoint." The man swears it, the
woman swears it; after which, they both take
leave of the mayor, and go and drink champagne
till midnight.

A used-up bachelor hears of the existence of
a marriageable young lady; he obtains
information respecting her portion and her expectations.
Expectations! Charming word to
express the death of her father and mother!
After this preliminary inquiry, de commodo et
incommodo, the suitor sends a plenipotentiary
to demand the hand [read, the purse] of the