CHAPTER XVII

Crack, crack----crack, crack----crack, crack----so this is _Paris!_ quoth I (continuing in the same mood)--and this is _Paris!_----humph! ----_Paris!_ cried I, repeating the name the third time----

The first, the finest, the most brilliant----

The streets however are nasty.

But it looks, I suppose, better than it smells----crack, crack----crack, crack----what a fuss thou makest! --as if it concerned the good people to be informed, that a man with pale face and clad in black, had the honour to be driven into _Paris_ at nine o’clock at night, by a postilion in a tawny yellow jerkin, turned up with red calamanco--crack, crack----crack, crack----crack, crack, ----I wish thy whip----

----But ’tis the spirit of thy nation; so crack--crack on.

Ha! ----and no one gives the wall! ----but in the SCHOOL of URBANITY herself, if the walls are besh-t--how can you do otherwise?

And prithee when do they light the lamps? What? --never in the summer months! ----Ho! ’tis the time of sallads. ----O rare! sallad and soup--soup and sallad--sallad and soup, _encore_----

----’Tis _too much_ for sinners.

Now I cannot bear the barbarity of it; how can that unconscionable coachman talk so much bawdy to that lean horse? don’t you see, friend, the streets are so villainously narrow, that there is not room in all _Paris_ to turn a wheelbarrow? In the grandest city of the whole world, it would not have been amiss, if they had been left a thought wider; nay, were it only so much in every single street, as that a man might know (was it only for satisfaction) on which side of it he was walking.

One--two--three--four--five--six--seven--eight--nine--ten. --Ten cook’s shops! and twice the number of barbers! and all within three minutes driving! one would think that all the cooks in the world, on some great merry-meeting with the barbers, by joint consent had said --Come, let us all go live at _Paris_: the _French_ love good eating----they are all _gourmands_----we shall rank high; if their god is their belly----their cooks must be gentlemen: and forasmuch as _the periwig maketh the man_, and the periwig-maker maketh the periwig--_ergo_, would the barbers say, we shall rank higher still--we shall be above you all--we shall be _Capitouls_[7.2] at least--_pardi!_ we shall all wear swords----

--And so, one would swear (that is, by candle light, --but there is no depending upon it) they continue to do, to this day.

[Footnote 7.2: Chief Magistrate in Toulouse, &c. &c. &c.]

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