coulisses." And this species of adventurer, we are told, has always the
same commencement to his memoirs,--"_Il vint a Paris en sabots._"

[Footnote 1: De Tocqueville.]

The numerous avocations of women in the French capital explain, in a
measure, their superior tact, efficiency, and force of character. This
is especially true of females of the middle class, who have been justly
described as remarkable for good sense and appropriate costumes. The
participation of women in so many departments of art and industry
affects, also, the social tone and the manners. Sterne, long ago,
remarked it of the fair shopkeepers. "The genius of a people," he says,
"where nothing but the monarchy is _Salique_, having ceded this
department totally to the women, by a continual higgling with customers
of all ranks and sizes, from morning to night, like so many rough
pebbles in a bag, by amicable collisions, they have worn down their
asperities and sharp angles, and not only become round and smooth, but
will receive, some of them, a polish like a brilliant."

How distinctly may be read the political vicissitudes of France in her
literature,--classic, highly finished, keen, and formal, when a monarch
was idolized and authors wrote only for courts and scholars: Bossuet,
with his rhetorical graces; La Bruyere, with his gallery of characters,
not one of which was moulded among the people; De la Rochefoucauld's
maxims, drawn from the arcana of fashionable life; Racine, whose heroes
die with an immaculate couplet and speak the faint echoes of Grecian or
Roman sentiment! When politics became common property, and the walls of
a prescriptive and conventional system fell, how wild ran speculation
and sentiment in the copious and superficial Voltaire and the vague
humanities of Rousseau! When an era of military despotism supervened