The Apartments
Are Dark, Ill-Furnished, Dirty, And Unprincely.
Take the castle,
chapel, and garden all together, they make a most fantastic
composition of magnificence and littleness, taste, and foppery.
After all, it is in England only, where we must look for cheerful
apartments, gay furniture, neatness, and convenience. There is a
strange incongruity in the French genius. With all their
volatility, prattle, and fondness for bons mots, they delight in
a species of drawling, melancholy, church music. Their most
favourite dramatic pieces are almost without incident; and the
dialogue of their comedies consists of moral, insipid
apophthegms, intirely destitute of wit or repartee. I know what
I hazard by this opinion among the implicit admirers of Lully,
Racine, and Moliere.
I don't talk of the busts, the statues, and pictures which abound
at Versailles, and other places in and about Paris, particularly
the great collection of capital pieces in the Palais-royal,
belonging to the duke of Orleans. I have neither capacity, nor
inclination, to give a critique on these chef d'oeuvres, which
indeed would take up a whole volume. I have seen this great
magazine of painting three times, with astonishment; but I should
have been better pleased, if there had not been half the number:
one is bewildered in such a profusion, as not to know where to
begin, and hurried away before there is time to consider one
piece with any sort of deliberation. Besides, the rooms are all
dark, and a great many of the pictures hang in a bad light. As
for Trianon, Marli, and Choissi, they are no more than pigeon-houses,
in respect to palaces; and, notwithstanding the
extravagant eulogiums which you have heard of the French king's
houses, I will venture to affirm that the king of England is
better, I mean more comfortably, lodged. I ought, however, to
except Fontainebleau, which I have not seen.
The city of Paris is said to be five leagues, or fifteen miles,
in circumference; and if it is really so, it must be much more
populous than London; for the streets are very narrow, and the
houses very high, with a different family on every floor. But I
have measured the best plans of these two royal cities, and am
certain that Paris does not take up near so much ground as
London and Westminster occupy; and I suspect the number of its
inhabitants is also exaggerated by those who say it amounts to
eight hundred thousand, that is two hundred thousand more than
are contained in the bills of mortality. The hotels of the French
noblesse, at Paris, take up a great deal of room, with their
courtyards and gardens; and so do their convents and churches. It
must be owned, indeed, that their streets are wonderfully crouded
with people and carriages.
The French begin to imitate the English, but only in such
particulars as render them worthy of imitation. When I was last
at Paris, no person of any condition,
male or female, appeared, but in full dress, even when obliged to
come out early in the morning, and there was not such a thing to
be seen as a perruque ronde; but at present I see a number of
frocks and scratches in a morning, in the streets of this
metropolis.
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