his snuff by the handful; he rode on horseback at full gallop up the
stairway of the orangery at Versailles. Writers and artists died in
the hospital, as a natural consequence of their eccentricities; they
were, moreover, all atheists, and people should be very careful not to
admit them into their households. Joseph Lebas cited with horror the
history of his step-sister Augustine's marriage with the painter
Sommervieux. Astronomers lived on spiders.

These striking points of information on the French language, on
dramatic art, politics, literature, and science, will explain the
bearings of the bourgeois intellect. A poet passing through the Rue
des Lombards may dream of Araby as he inhales certain perfumes. He may
admire the _danseuses_ in a _chauderie_, as he breathes the odors of
an Indian root. Dazzled by the blaze of cochineal, he recalls the
poems of the Veda, the religion of Brahma and its castes; brushing
against piles of ivory in the rough, he mounts the backs of elephants;
seated in a muslin cage, he makes love like the King of Lahore. But
the little retail merchant is ignorant from whence have come, or where
may grow, the products in which he deals. Birotteau, perfumer, did not
know an iota of natural history, nor of chemistry. Though regarding
Vauquelin as a great man, he thought him an exception,--of about the
same capacity as the retired grocer who summed up a discussion on the
method of importing teas, by remarking with a knowing air, "There are
but two ways: tea comes either by caravan, or by Havre." According to
Birotteau aloes and opium were only to be found in the Rue des
Lombards. Rosewater, said to be brought from Constantinople, was made
in Paris like eau-de-cologne. The names of these places were shams,
invented to please Frenchmen who could not endure the things of their
own country. A French merchant must call his discoveries English to
make them fashionable, just as in England the druggists attribute