the Chaussee d'Antin.--'Chacun a son mauvais gout.'

"I don't like the streets, in which I cannot walk but in the kennel; I
don't like the shops, that contain nothing except what's at the window; I
don't like the houses, like prisons which look upon a courtyard; I don't
like the _beaux jardins_, which grow no plants save a Cupid in plaster; I
don't like the wood fires, which demand as many _petits soins_ as the
women, and which warm no part of one but one's eyelids, I don't like the
language, with its strong phrases about nothing, and vibrating like a
pendulum between 'rapture' and 'desolation;' I don't like the accent,
which one cannot get, without speaking through one's nose; I don't like
the eternal fuss and jabber about books without nature, and revolutions
without fruit; I have no sympathy with tales that turn on a dead jackass,
nor with constitutions that give the ballot to the representatives, and
withhold the suffrage from the people; neither have I much faith in that
enthusiasm for the _beaux arts_, which shows its produce in execrable
music, detestable pictures, abominable sculpture, and a droll something
that I believe the _French_ call POETRY. Dancing and cookery,--these are
the arts the French excel in, I grant it; and excellent things they are;
but oh, England! oh, Germany! you need not be jealous of your rival!"

These are not the author's remarks,--he disowns them; they were Mr.
Cleveland's. He was a prejudiced man; Maltravers was more liberal, but
then Maltravers did not pretend to be a wit.

Maltravers had been several weeks in the city of cities, and now he had
his apartments in the gloomy but interesting Faubourg St. Germain, all to
himself. For Cleveland, having attended eight days at a sale, and having
moreover ransacked all the curiosity shops, and shipped off bronzes and
cabinets, and Genoese silks and _objets de vertu_, enough to have half