Honorine

Excerpt

If the French have as great an aversion for traveling as the English have a propensity for it, both English and French have perhaps sufficient reasons.  Something better than England is everywhere to be found; whereas it is excessively difficult to find the charms of France outside France.  Other countries can show admirable scenery, and they frequently offer greater comfort than that of France, which makes but slow progress in that particular.  They sometimes display a bewildering magnificence, grandeur, and luxury; they lack neither grace nor noble manners; but the life of the brain, the talent for conversation, the “Attic salt” so familiar at Paris, the prompt apprehension of what one is thinking, but does not say, the spirit of the unspoken, which is half the French language, is nowhere else to be met with.  Hence a Frenchman, whose raillery, as it is, finds so little comprehension, would wither in a foreign land like an uprooted tree.  Emigration is counter to the instincts of the French nation.  Many Frenchmen, of the kind here in question, have owned to pleasure at seeing the custom-house officers of their native land, which may seem the most daring hyperbole of patriotism.