a famous harvest for the restaurateurs and for the Cyprians who parade up
and down the Arcades, sure of a constant succession of suitors. In fact,
whatever be the taste of a man, whether sensual or intellectual or both, he
can gratify himself here without moving out of the precincts of the Palais
Royal. Here are cafés, restaurants, shops of all kinds whose display of
clocks, jewellery, stuffs, silks, merchandize from all parts of the world,
is most brilliant and dazzling; here you find reading-rooms where
newspapers, reviews and pamphlets of all tongues, nations and languages are
to be met with; here are museums of paintings, statues, plans in relief,
cosmoramas; here are libraries, gaming houses, houses of fair reception;
cellars where music, dancing and all kinds of orgies are carried on;
exhibitions of all sorts, learned pigs, dancing dogs, military canary
birds, hermaphrodites, giants, dwarf jugglers from Hindostan, catawbas from
America, serpents from Java, and crocodiles from the Nile. Here, so
Kotzebue has calculated, you may go through all the functions of life in
one day and end it afterwards should you be so inclined. You may eat,
drink, sleep, bathe, go to the _Cabinet d'aisance_, walk, read, make love,
game and, should you be tired of life, you may buy powder and ball or opium
to hasten your journey across Styx; or should you desire a more classic
_exit_, you may die like Seneca opening your veins in a bath. Deep play
goes forward day and night, and I verily believe there are some persons in
Paris who never quit these precincts. The restaurants and cafés are most
brilliantly fitted up. One, _Le Café des Mille Colonnes_, so called from
the reflection of the columns in the mirrors with which the wainscoat is
lined, boasts of a _limonadière_ of great beauty. She is certainly a fine
woman, dresses very well, as indeed most French women do, and has a
remarkably fine turned arm which she takes care to display on all
occasions. I do not, however, perceive much animation in her; she always
appears the same, nor has she made any more impression on me--tho' I am of
a very susceptible nature in this particular--than a fine statue or picture