Now, there are three other sets of apartments in the same house, and above Dubois, not so lofty as his, but nearly as commodious, and all with their proportionate degree of elegance and solid comfort. Dubois has not got a house at Dieppe, it is true; but then, like all Frenchmen, he is so absorbed in his dear Paris, that he hardly cares to stir out from it. If ever he does, he runs off to Vichy or Mont Dor for a fortnight in the _saison des eaux_, and he is contented.
But then, you will say, Dubois lives, after all, in another man's house--he is only a lodger; whereas Johnson dwells in what the law calls his "castle." Be it so; for the same money we would rather have the positive advantages of the one, _en société_, than the tasteless and inconvenient isolation of the other.
And, after all, is Johnson more decidedly at home in his own house, than Dubois is in his "_appartement_?" What does it matter whether you have people living on each side of you, with their street doors so close to yours that their wives or their daughters pop up their noses above the green blinds every time a cab or a jarvey drives up; or whether you have people who come in at the same gateway with yourself, and go up the same stairs, it is true, and who live either above or below you, and who can, if they like, run out on their landings to see who is thumping at your door panels? Upon our conscience as honest folks, who have lived in half the capitals of Europe, to say nothing of those of our own islands, we never found the slightest intrusion on privacy arising from the collecting of several families in the same house, in Paris, Rome, Florence, or Vienna. All we know is, and we often think of it agreeably, that these continental houses seemed to us like so many social colleges, and that the having a set of rooms with a common staircase, used to put us in mind of our old Christ Church, and of Garden Court in the Temple. 'Tis true, that in the one set of rooms we had no fellow-inmates except our dog, and every now and then a joyous set of fellows that would have made any place tolerable; that in the other there was our old laundress and bed-maker, and our "boy," and for a short time our "man," and actually, upon our honour it is true, we did once see a client in them! whereas, in our continental suites of chambers, we are _en famille_ with wife, bairns, and "bounes" to boot, and that we did _parfois_ try the elasticity or the stretching powers of our _camere_ pretty considerably, and did cram therein no end of guests. But on the whole, we have fairly made the experiment _in propriâ personâ_; we have weighed well friend Johnson's castellated independence, and _l'ami_ Dubois's social contiguation;--and, rent for rent, we prefer the latter. If we must live with two neighbours within a few feet of us, we would rather have one under us on the ground floor, and one above us on the second, and ourselves in the midst on the first, and all three clubbing together to live in a little palazzo:--we would rather have this, than be crammed in between Mr A and Mr B, each of us in a third or fourth rate kind of house, with poor thin walls, small low rooms, dirty areas, melancholy gardens, shabby-genteel fronts, ugly backs, and little comfort.