work-table;--ladies carry it about in their reticules to show each
other that they are _à la mode_; and the men--what can they do but
humble their understandings and be _extasiés_, when beautiful eyes
sparkle in its defence and glisten in its praise, and ruby lips
pronounce it divine, delicious; "quelle sublimité dans les
descriptions, quelle force dans les caractères! quelle âme! feu!
chaleur! verve! originalité! passion!" etc.

"Vous n'avez pas lu le Solitaire?" said Madame M. yesterday. "Eh mon
dieu! il est donc possible! vous? mais, ma chère, vous êtes perdue de
réputation, et pour jamais!"

To retrieve my lost reputation, I sat down to read Le Solitaire, and
as I read my amazement grew, and I did in "gaping wonderment abound,"
to think that fashion, like the insane root of old, had power to drive
a whole city mad with nonsense; for such a tissue of abominable
absurdities, bombast and blasphemy, bad taste and bad language, was
never surely indited by any madman, in or out of Bedlam: not Maturin
himself, that king of fustian,

"----ever wrote or borrowed
Any thing half so horrid!"

and this is the book which has turned the brains of half Paris, which
has gone through fifteen editions in a few weeks, which not to admire
is "_pitoyable_," and not to have read "_quelque chose d'inouie_."

The objects at Paris which have most struck me, have been those least
vaunted.