visiting:" the women well-dressed and smiling, and with a certain
jaunty air, trip along with their peculiar mincing step, and appear as
if their sole object was but to show themselves; the men ill-dressed,
slovenly, and in general ill-looking, lounge indolently, and stare as
if they had no other purpose in life but to look about them.[B]

_July 12._--"Quel est à Paris le suprême talent? celui d'amuser: et
quel est le suprême bonheur? l'amusement."

Then _le suprême bonheur_ may be found every evening from nine to ten,
in a walk along the Boulevards, or a ramble through the Champs
Elysées, and from ten to twelve in a salon at Tortoni's.

What an extraordinary scene was that I witnessed to-night! how truly
_French_! Spite of myself and all my melancholy musings, and all my
philosophic allowances for the difference of national character, I was
irresistibly compelled to smile at some of the farcical groups we
encountered. In the most crowded parts of the Champs Elysées this
evening (Sunday), there sat an old lady with a wrinkled yellow face
and sharp features, dressed in flounced gown of dirty white muslin, a
pink sash and a Leghorn hat and feathers. In one hand she held a small
tray for the contribution of amateurs, and in the other an Italian
bravura, which she sung or rather screamed out with a thousand
indescribable shruggings, contortions, and grimaces, and in a voice to
which a cracked tea-kettle, or a "brazen candlestick turned," had
seemed the music of the spheres. A little farther on we found two
elderly gentlemen playing at see-saw; one an immense corpulent man of
fifteen stone at least, the other a thin dwarfish animal with gray
mustachios, who held before him what I thought was a child, but on
approaching, it proved to be a large stone strapped before him, to