the express purpose of looking black at one another. When they ask you,
"how you do," you would think they were measuring the length of your
coffin. They are ever, it is true, labouring to be agreeable; but they
are like Sisyphus, the stone they roll up the hill with so much toil,
runs down again, and hits you a thump on the legs. They are sometimes
polite, but invariably uncivil; their warmth is always artificial--their
cold never, they are stiff without dignity, and cringing without manners.
They offer you an affront, and call it "plain truth;" they wound your
feelings, and tell you it is manly "to speak their minds;" at the same
time, while they have neglected all the graces and charities of artifice,
they have adopted all its falsehood and deceit. While they profess to
abhor servility, they adulate the peerage--while they tell you they care
not a rush for the minister, they move heaven and earth for an invitation
from the minister's wife. There is not another court in Europe where such
systematized meanness is carried on,--where they will even believe you,
when you assert that it exists. Abroad, you can smile at the vanity of
one class, and the flattery of another: the first, is too well bred to
affront, the latter, too graceful to disgust; but here, the pride of a
noblesse, (by the way, the most mushroom in Europe,) knocks you down in a
hail-storm, and the fawning of the bourgeois makes you sick with hot
water. Then their amusements--the heat--the dust--the sameness--the
slowness of that odious park in the morning; and the same exquisite scene
repeated in the evening, on the condensed stage of a rout-room, where one
has more heat, with less air, and a narrower dungeon, with diminished
possibility of escape!--we wander about like the damned in the story of
Vathek, and we pass our lives, like the royal philosopher of Prussia, in
conjugating the verb, Je m'ennuie.