I accordingly engaged a room in the house of a lady of pure French
extraction and education, who supplements the shortcomings of an income
insufficient to the ever-growing demands of the Parisian system of sense-
gratification, by providing food and lodging for a limited number of
distinguished strangers. I should have preferred to have my room alone
in the house, and to take my meals in a brewery, of very good appearance,
which I speedily discovered in the same street; but this arrangement,
though very lucidly proposed by myself; was not acceptable to the
mistress of the establishment (a woman with a mathematical head), and I
have consoled myself for the extra expense by fixing my thoughts upon the
opportunity that conformity to the customs of the house gives me of
studying the table-manners of my companions, and of observing the French
nature at a peculiarly physiological moment, the moment when the
satisfaction of the _taste_, which is the governing quality in its
composition, produces a kind of exhalation, an intellectual
transpiration, which, though light and perhaps invisible to a superficial
spectator, is nevertheless appreciable by a properly adjusted instrument.
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