Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

FRENCHMEN OP THE NEW SCHOOL. 217

sneering self-sufficiency ; this knowledge, for the most part devoid of imagination, which turns the intellect into a storehouse of facts and dates, more or less well classed, but always cited with a dryness which robs truth of its value, for without heart, a man cannot be truthful, he can only be exact; this continual look-out of that advance-guard of conversation, vanity, reconnoitring each thought of others, expressed or not expressed, in order to extract from it advantage ; this forgetfulness of others, carried to the point of unknowingly insulting them through not perceiving that the high opinion a person entertains of himself is lowering to the rest; this total absence of sensibility, which only serves to increase susceptibility, evinced by bitter hostility elevated into a patriotic duty, by a constant liability to be offended at some preference of which another may be the object, or at some correction, however useful the lesson given ; — in short, all this infatuation, serving as the buckler of folly against truth, with many other traits, which some of my readers will supply better than I can, appears to me to characterise the present race of young Frenchmen, from ten years old and upwards, for that is the age at which they become men in these days.

Such characters injure our position among foreigners ; they have little influence in Paris, where the number of models of this species of impertinence is so great as to attract no attention, where they are lost in a crowd like themselves, just as instruments drown each other in an orehcstre: but when they become isolated, and placed in the midst of a society whei`e reign passions and habits of mind different from those which agitate the French world, they

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