Finally, in this exclusive little set include two or three
ecclesiastics, admitted for the sake of their cloth, or for their wit;
for these great nobles find their own society rather dull, and
introduce the bourgeois element into their drawing-rooms, as a baker
puts leaven into his dough.

The sum-total contained by all heads put together consists of a
certain quantity of antiquated notions; a few new inflections brewed
in company of an evening being added from time to time to the common
stock. Like sea-water in a little creek, the phrases which represent
these ideas surge up daily, punctually obeying the tidal laws of
conversation in their flow and ebb; you hear the hollow echo of
yesterday, to-day, to-morrow, a year hence, and for evermore. On all
things here below they pass immutable judgments, which go to make up a
body of tradition into which no power of mortal man can infuse one
drop of wit or sense. The lives of these persons revolve with the
regularity of clockwork in an orbit of use and wont which admits of no
more deviation or change than their opinions on matters religious,
political, moral, or literary.

If a stranger is admitted to the /cenacle/, every member of it in turn
will say (not without a trace of irony), "You will not find the
brilliancy of your Parisian society here," and proceed forthwith to
criticise the life led by his neighbors, as if he himself were an
exception who had striven, and vainly striven, to enlighten the rest.
But any stranger so ill advised as to concur in any of their freely
expressed criticism of each other, is pronounced at once to be an
ill-natured person, a heathen, an outlaw, a reprobate Parisian "as
Parisians mostly are."