spot where even the corners speak of a secular past, there to evoke some
representatives of the most modern, as well as the most arbitrary and the
most momentary, life. You, who know better than any one the motley world
of cosmopolites, understand why I have confined myself to painting here
only a fragment of it. That world, indeed, does not exist, it can have
neither defined customs nor a general character. It is composed of
exceptions and of singularities. We are so naturally creatures of
custom, our continual mobility has such a need of gravitating around one
fixed axis, that motives of a personal order alone can determine us upon
an habitual and voluntary exile from our native land. It is so, now in
the case of an artist, a person seeking for instruction and change; now
in the case of a business man who desires to escape the consequences of
some scandalous error; now in the case of a man of pleasure in search of
new adventures; in the case of another, who cherishes prejudices from
birth, it is the longing to find the "happy mean;" in the case of
another, flight from distasteful memories. The life of the cosmopolite
can conceal all beneath the vulgarity of its whims, from snobbery in
quest of higher connections to swindling in quest of easier prey,
submitting to the brilliant frivolities of the sport, the sombre
intrigues of policy, or the sadness of a life which has been a failure.
Such a variety of causes renders at once very attractive and almost
impracticable the task of the author who takes as a model that ever-
changing society so like unto itself in the exterior rites and fashions,
so really, so intimately complex and composite in its fundamental
elements. The writer is compelled to take from it a series of leading
facts, as I have done, essaying to deduce a law which governs them. That
law, in the present instance, is the permanence of race. Contradictory
as may appear this result, the more one studies the cosmopolites, the
more one ascertains that the most irreducible idea within them is that
special strength of heredity which slumbers beneath the monotonous