1831.] My Uncle's Diary at Calais. 521 



9th April. I'was arrested for three francs, by the malice of a ' Jezabel, 

 who found that I had purchased articles, in which she dealt, at other 

 shops. In this land of modern liberty I paid the sixty sous, and stood 

 superior to their lenient and impartial laws. 



Mem. Never to owe another sou in France, and invariably to have 

 " Acquit" on every bill, however large or small. 



10th April. The French have no idea of what we call " a home." 

 Their pleasures are of a vagabond, external character : their sole and 

 whole pursuit is money. I never followed any Frenchmen talking, 

 but " money, money, money," was the topic of their conversation. Their 

 grimaces, bows, and phrases are a miserable compound of fallacious 

 humbug. I see no friendships round me every thing is artificial and 

 deceptive. They have not our faults ; but they have not our virtues. 

 They are satisfied with inconvenience, dirt, and wretchedness, because 

 they never knew the comfort, cleanliness, and plenty of an Englishman. 

 Their propensities are not propensities of principle. A Frenchman has 

 no piety : his religion is a form a mere expedient ; not a feeling or 

 a duty. He holds nothing to be reverend or sacred. In the saying of the 

 impious wit, Voltaire, they were alternately tigers and monkeys. The 

 breed is crossed, and now they smack of both. They lack the rational 

 devotion of good subjects, and hardly one among them can regard autho- 

 rity with deferent affection. They doat on politics because they vary, 

 and abominate all order from the fear of permanence. They talk of 

 liberty and equal rights, while the spirit of their law protects the roguery 

 of natives, and exposes foreigners to injury and persecution. Why was 

 I subjected to the loss of freedom, and a possible expense of great enor- 

 mity, because by accident I left unpaid a bill of sixty sous ? Is this 

 their rights of man, their generous impartiality, their philanthropic ten- 

 derness for liberty ? 



llth April. I am sickened with exotic comforts ; I am insensible to 

 foreign elegance. 1 have a cupboard for a bed -room a wilderness of 

 sand to dine in a towel for a table-cloth and a cheese-plate, as a dish, 

 to hold my leg of mutton. The forks and spoons are dim and dirty, and 

 a lie is stamped on every knife. Sheer-steel, indeed ! sheer-tin, it should 

 be. If they made their knives of what they make their buttons, we 

 should carve an Indian-rubber-stew with ease ! I have cut my finger to 

 the bone in putting on my gaiters ! 



April 12th. Visited a cafe a receptacle for English indolence and 

 French frivolity, in which meanness and finery are fantastically con- 

 trasted marble slabs, rush-bottomed chairs, gilded lamps, sanded floors, 

 pejidules, Cupids, bouquets, mirrors, pipes, bottled beer, dogs, cats, and 

 parrots. A melange of company, and diversity of pursuit, are remark- 

 able in these extraordinary haunts. The demon of play tortures some, 

 who would stake their being, were it capable of transfer, on a game of 

 ecarte or bouillotte ; while the table is surrounded by the lovers of the 

 vice, whose purses are exhausted, but whose propensity is rather ob- 

 structed than subdued. I have seen them, pennyless, lingering round 

 the players, till the last card, when the exulting winner and the dejected 

 .loser depart, and leave the tribe of languid strollers to seek a refuge^ 

 from the world's hopelessness in the oblivion of their beds. Others 

 are clamorously loquacious in clouds of smoke, the wrath of politics, and 

 the inflation of bottled beer ; others, again, who fancy that the dislike 

 of being alone is the love of society, frequent the cafe to put their hands 



M. M. New Series. VOL. XI. No. 65. 3 X 



