is not at all _bourgeois_; there is something distinguished, something
aristocratic, about it. The Pension Vauquer was dark, brown, sordid,
_graisseuse_; but this is in quite a different tone, with high, clear,
lightly-draped windows, tender, subtle, almost morbid, colours, and
furniture in elegant, studied, reed-like lines. Madame de Maisonrouge
reminds me of Madame Hulot--do you remember "la belle Madame Hulot?"--in
_Les Barents Pauvres_. She has a great charm; a little artificial, a
little fatigued, with a little suggestion of hidden things in her life;
but I have always been sensitive to the charm of fatigue, of duplicity.

I am rather disappointed, I confess, in the society I find here; it is
not so local, so characteristic, as I could have desired. Indeed, to
tell the truth, it is not local at all; but, on the other hand, it is
cosmopolitan, and there is a great advantage in that. We are French, we
are English, we are American, we are German; and, I believe, there are
some Russians and Hungarians expected. I am much interested in the study
of national types; in comparing, contrasting, seizing the strong points,
the weak points, the point of view of each. It is interesting to shift
one's point of view--to enter into strange, exotic ways of looking at
life.

The American types here are not, I am sorry to say, so interesting as
they might be, and, excepting myself; are exclusively feminine. We are
_thin_, my dear Harvard; we are pale, we are sharp. There is something
meagre about us; our line is wanting in roundness, our composition in
richness. We lack temperament; we don't know how to live; _nous ne
savons pas vivre_, as they say here. The American temperament is
represented (putting myself aside, and I often think that my temperament
is not at all American) by a young girl and her mother, and another young
girl without her mother--without her mother or any attendant or appendage