In 1740, Montesquieu, in a letter to a friend, wrote: 'France is nothing but Paris and a few distant provinces.' 'Here,' says a traveller of the last century, 'things are estimated by their _air_; a watch may be a master-piece without exactness, and a woman rule the whole town without beauty, if they have an air. Here life's a dance, and awkwardness of step its greatest disgrace. Character, here, is dissolved into the public, and 'an original' a name of mirth. _Cela se fait_, _et cela ne se fait pas_, are here the supreme umpires of conduct. Their religion is superstition, fashion, sophism. Tyranny may grind the face, but not the countenance of a Frenchman; his feet are made to dance in wooden shoes. The parliament resembles an old toothless mastiff. France was the country of Le Soeur and Racine, and is that of Voltaire.'
And a more generalized and recent portrait is given by our countryman, Henry James: 'Your true Frenchman will sit for any number of consecutive hours glued to the benches of the _Champs Elysees_ in order to see the _monde_ pass by--to see it merely with his eyes, remember--never speaking to a soul, never knowing a soul in all the moving mass, yet perfectly content to see the monotonous waves roll on and repeat their tiresome glare, till darkness comes at last to snatch them from sight, and the beholder (let us hope) from imbecility. To frequent from childhood to manhood, and from manhood to old age, the same unchanging scenes; to sit year in and year out on the same dusty sidewalks, in front of the same crowded and noisy _cafés_, playing the same eternal dominoes, seeing pass the same throng of similar people, each as like the other in his diversity as a big pea is like a little pea, as a double clover is like a single clover, or a wilted cabbage is like a fresh one; everlastingly sipping the same _eau sucre_; everlastingly hearing and repeating the same stupid gossip of Mrs. B. to-day, which was heard and repeated of Mrs. A. yesterday; everlastingly resorting to the same play-house to applaud the same actors; running to the same opera to go into ecstasies over the same fiddle; strolling along the same streets to gaze at the same or similar prints in the same windows at the end of the year which he gazed upon at the beginning; such is your true Frenchman's conception of variety, such is his ideal of life; and he cannot but heartily despise a state of things like that at home, which drops all this imbecile routine out as an infinite dreariness and _ennui_; a full stomach, a faithful wife or mistress, and an honored name, and he will agree to live forever in immortal joy. Life to him is not the commerce or play of an infinite inward ideal, with a responsive outward organization; it is rather the commerce or play of a finite outward organization with what is still more finite and outward than itself, namely, the universe of sense. GOD forbid that I should undervalue a mental constitution so pronounced, and, in its way, so admirable; I only allege it to show that the Frenchman commits suicide only when some tangible possession takes its departure from him; only when poverty, or some other palpable calamity, comes to shake him out of his easy-going routine, and that he can't imagine any profounder source of disgust.'