To such an extent does the tyranny of custom dominate in the social history of France, that duels and gaming have their periods of triumph as well as bonnets and constitutions; at times they have each enjoyed a fashionable _prestige_, so that individuals, without the least taste for either occupation, in order to be _comme il faut_ have sought to lose a notable amount at roulette and to provoke some famous swordsman to combat. An acute observer of Parisian life, prophesies that two growing tastes are now at work destined to modify the French character, one the rage for English horses, and the other the use of cigars. Of the normal traits of the national mind, that which apparently remains most intact is the instinct of military life. The same adaptation for the camp that we recognize in Froissart's Chronicles and Napoleon's campaigns, is obvious at this moment. 'This is worth considering,' says Montaigne, 'that our nation places valor (vaillance) in the highest degree of virtue.'
The same extravagant notion of an Englishman's whims and _sangfroid_ prevail in the French capital as used to supply farce-writers before the age of steam. Veron recently published the anecdote of _un Anglais_, who had been his neighbor at a restaurant for several weeks, bidding him good-by one day, as he was going on a trip round the world; and eighteen months after, the traveller reäppeared at the accustomed hour and table, and found his old companion in the same seat; meantime, the Englishman had circumnavigated the globe. We are told in Paris of every conceivable mania on the part of English collectors; one spent a fortune in bottles of water from all the rivers in the world, one in every kind of pipe, and another in specimens of bird's eggs. On the other hand, the French are better understood across the Channel; it is curious, at the present era of alliance, to read one of the old travellers, who reported France to Londoners, in the heyday of British prejudice. 'What is there,' says the famous Thomas Nashe, 'in France to be learned more than in England, but falsehood in friendship, perfect slovenry, and to love no man for my pleasure? I have known some that have continued there by the space of half-a-dozen years, and when they came home they have had a little, weerish, lean-face, under a broad French hat, kept a terrible coil with the dust in the street in their long cloaks of gray paper, and spoken English strangely. Naught else have they profited by their travel, but to distinguish the true Bordeaux grape and know a cup of neat Gascoigne wine from wine of Orleans; yet peradventure to wear a velvet patch on their face and walk melancholy with their arms folded.'[A]