they frequently offer greater comfort than that of France, which makes
but slow progress in that particular. They sometimes display a
bewildering magnificence, grandeur, and luxury; they lack neither
grace nor noble manners; but the life of the brain, the talent for
conversation, the "Attic salt" so familiar at Paris, the prompt
apprehension of what one is thinking, but does not say, the spirit of
the unspoken, which is half the French language, is nowhere else to be
met with. Hence a Frenchman, whose raillery, as it is, finds so little
comprehension, would wither in a foreign land like an uprooted tree.
Emigration is counter to the instincts of the French nation. Many
Frenchmen, of the kind here in question, have owned to pleasure at
seeing the custom-house officers of their native land, which may seem
the most daring hyperbole of patriotism.

This preamble is intended to recall to such Frenchmen as have traveled
the extreme pleasure they have felt on occasionally finding their
native land, like an oasis, in the drawing-room of some diplomate: a
pleasure hard to be understood by those who have never left the
asphalt of the Boulevard des Italiens, and to whom the Quais of the
left bank of the Seine are not really Paris. To find Paris again! Do
you know what that means, O Parisians? It is to find--not indeed the
cookery of the _Rocher de Cancale_ as Borel elaborates it for those
who can appreciate it, for that exists only in the Rue Montorgueil
--but a meal which reminds you of it! It is to find the wines of
France, which out of France are to be regarded as myths, and as rare
as the woman of whom I write! It is to find--not the most fashionable
pleasantry, for it loses its aroma between Paris and the frontier--but
the witty understanding, the critical atmosphere in which the French
live, from the poet down to the artisan, from the duchess to the boy
in the street.