begins until they have gone some distance. This period of silence is
employed as much in mutual examination as in settling into their
places. Minds need to get their equilibrium as much as bodies. When
each person thinks he has discovered the age, profession, and
character of his companions, the most talkative member of the company
begins, and the conversation gets under way with all the more vivacity
because those present feel a need of enlivening the journey and
forgetting its tedium.

That is how things happen in French stage-coaches. In other countries
customs are very different. Englishmen pique themselves on never
opening their lips; Germans are melancholy in a vehicle; Italians too
wary to talk; Spaniards have no public conveyances; and Russians no
roads. There is no amusement except in the lumbering diligences of
France, that gabbling and indiscreet country, where every one is in a
hurry to laugh and show his wit, and where jest and epigram enliven
all things, even the poverty of the lower classes and the weightier
cares of the solid bourgeois. In a coach there is no police to check
tongues, and legislative assemblies have set the fashion of public
discussion. When a young man of twenty-two, like the one named
Georges, is clever and lively, he is much tempted, especially under
circumstances like the present, to abuse those qualities.

In the first place, Georges had soon decided that he was the superior
human being of the party there assembled. He saw in the count a
manufacturer of the second-class, whom he took, for some unknown
reason, to be a chandler; in the shabby young man accompanied by
Mistigris, a fellow of no account; in Oscar a ninny, and in Pere
Leger, the fat farmer, an excellent subject to hoax. Having thus
looked over the ground, he resolved to amuse himself at the expense of