"Paris," once said Victor Hugo to me, "is the hostess of all the nations. There all the world is at home. It is the second best place with all foreigners--the fatherland first, and afterward Paris."
There was a great deal of truth in the observation, and especially is it true as regards Americans. By our natural sociability and versatility of temperament, by our love of all bright and pleasant surroundings, by our taste for pleasure and amusement, we assimilate more closely in our superficial characteristics to the French nation than we do to any other. Our Britannic cousins are too cold, too unsociable, too heavy for our fraternization, and mighty barriers of dissimilarity of language, of tastes, of customs and manners divide us from the European nation which of all others we most closely resemble in essential particulars--namely, the Northern Germans. The Prussians have been called--and that, too, with a good deal of truth--the Yankees of Europe; and if the term "Yankees" means, as it usually does in European parlance, the entire population of the United States, we citizens of the great republic have every right to feel proud of the comparison. Yet, with all our genuine respect and admiration for the Prussians, there are but few American tourists who take kindly to that people or their country. The lack of the external polish, the graceful manners and winning ways of the Parisians is severely felt by the chance tarrier within the gates of Berlin. We accord our fullest meed of honor to the great conquering nation of Europe, to its wonderful system of education, its admirable military discipline, and its sturdy opposition to superstition and ignorance in their most aggressive form. And yet we do not like Prussia or the Prussians. We scoff at Berlin, planted on a sandy plain and new with the thriving, aggressive newness of some of our own cities. We long for the soft shadows of antiquity, the dim twilight of past glories, to overhang our daily path as we journey onward through the storied lands of the ancient world. We have enough of bright progressive prosperity at home. Something of the feeling of the artist, who turns from the trim, elegant damsel arrayed in the latest fashion to paint the figure of a beggar-girl draped in picturesque rags, hangs about us as we travel. It is only to Paris--Paris beautiful in its strange blending of smoky ruins and splendid, freshly-erected mansions--that we can pardon the white glare of newly-opened streets, the Vandal desecration of antique landmarks, the universal sacrifice of old memories, historic associations and antique picturesqueness on that altar of modern progress whose high priest was Baron Haussmann and whose divinity was Napoleon III.