Concealing my agitation under a strain of light conversation,
"Mademoiselle," I said, in answer to a question, "music is to-day the
necessity of the universe. France is commissioned to amuse the world.
Suppress our theatre, opera, Paris, and a settled melancholy pervades
the human family. You have no idea of the ennui that desolates the
hemispheres.

"Occasionally Paris enlivens the two Indias by dethroning a king. Once
Calcutta was _in extremis_, it was dying of the blues; the East India
company was rich but not amusing; with all its treasure it could not buy
one smile for Calcutta, so Paris sent Robert le Diable, La Muette de
Portici, a drama or two of Hugo and Dumas. Calcutta became convalescent
and recovered. Its neighbor, Chandernagore, scarcely existed then, but
in 1842, when I left the Isle de Bourbon, La Favorita was announced; it
planted roses in the cheeks of the jaundiced inhabitants, and Madras,
possessed by the spleen, was exorcised by William Tell.

"Whenever a tropical city is conscious of approaching decline, she
always stretches her hands beseechingly to Paris, who responds with
music, books, newspapers; and her patient springs into new life.

"Paris does not seem to be aware of her influences. She detracts from
herself; says she is not the Paris of yesterday, the Paris of the great
century; that her influence is gone, she is in the condition of the
Lower Empire.

"She builds eighty leagues of fortifications to sustain the siege of
Mahomet II. She weeps over her downfall and accuses Heaven of denying
to her children of '44 the genius and talents that characterized the