'You would hardly believe,' said Madame de Maintenon, 'how much a talent for combing hair contributed to my elevation:' tact in the minor economies, the ability to minister to approbativeness and epicurism, no where finds such scope as in Paris. 'Be more amiable,' said an experienced mother to her daughter, an _employé_ of the opera, 'be more tender and _empresse_ to your admirers, if not for your child's sake, or for your mother's, then for your _voiture_!' The triumph of material niceties here reaches its acme: from what an infinite variety of petty resources is French subsistence and enjoyment derived! A journal of our day announces the death of a distinguished _claquer_, at his country-seat, and the event is signalized by an obituary notice, declaring him 'master of the art of expressing feeling according to the subject!' A eulogy nowhere else applicable to any but an author, composer or artist, thus celebrates one whose vocation it was to testify approbation and blame at the theatre! Liquorice-water, the caricature of an abbe, an omelette scientifically fried, a fancy clock; a woman in front of Tortoni's letting off swallows from a basket, at two sous a flight; a bird-cage, a flower-stand, a plaster bust, a lap-dog, a fan, a little glass of Otard, a cake of scented soap, an opera-glass, a pan of charcoal, a wax candle, or a parrot, an elegant coiffure, a geranium leaf, or a bit of sugar--where on earth, but in Paris, do such things weigh so much in the scale of diurnal experience, felicity, and even fate?
How many 'gentle stoics' exhibit frugality and contentment; how many complacent epicureans ingenuity in pleasure-seeking; how many devotees of science isolated self-devotion, in that mart of humanity! We are told of a famous surgeon who questioned the credited idea that a vital gun-shot wound is followed by an involuntary leap, or sudden turning of the body: called to the field, and mortally wounded, he exclaimed, 'It is true; I could not help that movement,' and so died. In no other meridian do the frivolous and the solemn, the fantastic and the philosophic associations of life thus incongruously blend.