Chapter VI. Rome (1859-1860)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

THE tramp in Thuringen lasted four-and-twenty hours. By the end
of the first walk, his three companions -- John Bancroft, James J.
Higginson, and B. W. Crowninshield, all Boston and Harvard College
like himself -- were satisfied with what they had seen, and when they
sat down to rest on the spot where Goethe had written --

"Warte nur! balde Rubest du auch!" --
the profoundness of the thought and the wisdom of the advice
affected them so strongly that they hired a wagon and drove to Weimar
the same night. They were all quite happy and lighthearted in the
first fresh breath of leafless spring, and the beer was better than
at Berlin, but they were all equally in doubt why they had come to
Germany, and not one of them could say why they stayed. Adams stayed
because he did not want to go home, and he had fears that his
father's patience might be exhausted if he asked to waste time
elsewhere.

They could not think that their education required a return to
Berlin. A few days at Dresden in the spring weather satisfied them
that Dresden was a better spot for general education than Berlin, and
equally good for reading Civil Law. They were possibly right. There
was nothing to study in Dresden, and no education to be gained, but
the Sistine Madonna and the Correggios were famous; the theatre and
opera were sometimes excellent, and the Elbe was prettier than the
Spree. They could always fall back on the language. So he took a room
in the household of the usual small government clerk with the usual
plain daughters, and continued the study of the language. Possibly
one might learn something more by accident, as one had learned
something of Beethoven. For the next eighteen months the young man
pursued accidental education, since he could pursue no other; and by
great good fortune, Europe and America were too busy with their own
affairs to give much attention to his. Accidental education had every
chance in its favor, especially because nothing came amiss.

Perhaps the chief obstacle to the youth's education, now that he
had come of age, was his honesty; his simple-minded faith in his
intentions. Even after Berlin had become a nightmare, he still
persuaded himself that his German education was a success. He loved,
or thought he loved the people, but the Germany he loved was the
eighteenth-century which the Germans were ashamed of, and were
destroying as fast as they could. Of the Germany to come, he knew
nothing. Military Germany was his abhorrence. What he liked was the
simple character; the good-natured sentiment; the musical and
metaphysical abstraction; the blundering incapacity of the German for
practical affairs. At that time everyone looked on Germany as
incapable of competing with France, England or America in any sort of
organized energy. Germany had no confidence in herself, and no reason
to feel it. She had no unity, and no reason to want it. She never had
unity. Her religious and social history, her economical interests,
her military geography, her political convenience, had always tended
to eccentric rather than concentric motion. Until coal-power and
railways were created, she was mediaeval by nature and geography, and
this was what Adams, under the teachings of Carlyle and Lowell,
liked.

He was in a fair way to do himself lasting harm, floundering
between worlds passed and worlds coming, which had a habit of
crushing men who stayed too long at the points of contact. Suddenly
the Emperor Napoleon declared war on Austria and raised a confused
point of morals in the mind of Europe. France was the nightmare of
Germany, and even at Dresden one looked on the return of Napoleon to
Leipsic as the most likely thing in the world. One morning the
government clerk, in whose family Adams was staying, rushed into his
room to consult a map in order that he might measure the distance
from Milan to Dresden. The third Napoleon had reached Lombardy, and
only fifty or sixty years had passed since the first Napoleon had
begun his military successes from an Italian base.

An enlightened young American, with eighteenth-century tastes
capped by fragments of a German education and the most excellent
intentions, had to make up his mind about the moral value of these
conflicting forces. France was the wicked spirit of moral politics,
and whatever helped France must be so far evil. At that time Austria
was another evil spirit. Italy was the prize they disputed, and for
at least fifteen hundred years had been the chief object of their
greed. The question of sympathy had disturbed a number of persons
during that period. The question of morals had been put in a number
of cross-lights. Should one be Guelph or Ghibelline? No doubt, one
was wiser than one's neighbors who had found no way of settling this
question since the days of the cave-dwellers, but ignorance did
better to discard the attempt to be wise, for wisdom had been
singularly baffled by the problem. Better take sides first, and
reason about it for the rest of life.

Not that Adams felt any real doubt about his sympathies or
wishes. He had not been German long enough for befogging his mind to
that point, but the moment was decisive for much to come, especially
for political morals. His morals were the highest, and he clung to
them to preserve his self-respect; but steam and electricity had
brought about new political and social concentrations, or were making
them necessary in the line of his moral principles -- freedom,
education, economic development and so forth -- which required
association with allies as doubtful as Napoleon III, and robberies
with violence on a very extensive scale. As long as he could argue
that his opponents were wicked, he could join in robbing and killing
them without a qualm; but it might happen that the good were robbed.
Education insisted on finding a moral foundation for robbery. He
could hope to begin life in the character of no animal more moral
than a monkey unless he could satisfy himself when and why robbery
and murder were a virtue and duty. Education founded on mere
self-interest was merely Guelph and Ghibelline over again --
Machiavelli translated into American.

Luckily for him he had a sister much brighter than he ever was
-- though he thought himself a rather superior person -- who after
marrying Charles Kuhn, of Philadelphia, had come to Italy, and, like
all good Americans and English, was hotly Italian. In July, 1859, she
was at Thun in Switzerland, and there Henry Adams joined them. Women
have, commonly, a very positive moral sense; that which they will, is
right; that which they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most
cases, ends by settling the moral. Mrs. Kuhn had a double
superiority. She not only adored Italy, but she cordially disliked
Germany in all its varieties. She saw no gain in helping her brother
to be Germanized, and she wanted him much to be civilized. She was
the first young woman he was ever intimate with -- quick, sensitive,
wilful, or full of will, energetic, sympathetic and intelligent
enough to supply a score of men with ideas -- and he was delighted to
give her the reins -- to let her drive him where she would. It was
his first experiment in giving the reins to a woman, and he was so
much pleased with the results that he never wanted to take them back.
In after life he made a general law of experience -- no woman had
ever driven him wrong; no man had ever driven him right.

Nothing would satisfy Mrs. Kuhn but to go to the seat of war as
soon as the armistice was declared. Wild as the idea seemed, nothing
was easier. The party crossed the St. Gothard and reached Milan,
picturesque with every sort of uniform and every sign of war. To
young Adams this first plunge into Italy passed Beethoven as a piece
of accidental education. Like music, it differed from other education
in being, not a means of pursuing life, but one of the ends attained.
Further, on these lines, one could not go. It had but one defect --
that of attainment. Life had no richer impression to give; it offers
barely half-a-dozen such, and the intervals seem long. Exactly what
they teach would puzzle a Berlin jurist; yet they seem to have an
economic value, since most people would decline to part with even
their faded memories except at a valuation ridiculously extravagant.
They were also what men pay most for; but one's ideas become
hopelessly mixed in trying to reduce such forms of education to a
standard of exchangeable value, and, as in political economy, one had
best disregard altogether what cannot be stated in equivalents. The
proper equivalent of pleasure is pain, which is also a form of
education.

Not satisfied with Milan, Mrs. Kuhn insisted on invading the
enemy's country, and the carriage was chartered for Innsbruck by way
of the Stelvio Pass. The Valtellina, as the carriage drove up it,
showed war. Garibaldi's Cacciatori were the only visible inhabitants.
No one could say whether the pass was open, but in any case no
carriage had yet crossed. At the inns the handsome young officers in
command of the detachments were delighted to accept invitations to
dinner and to talk all the evening of their battles to the charming
patriot who sparkled with interest and flattery, but not one of them
knew whether their enemies, the abhorred Austrian Jagers, would let
the travellers through their lines. As a rule, gaiety was not the
character failing in any party that Mrs. Kuhn belonged to, but when
at last, after climbing what was said to be the finest carriage-pass
in Europe, the carriage turned the last shoulder, where the glacier
of the Ortler Spitze tumbled its huge mass down upon the road, even
Mrs. Kuhn gasped when she was driven directly up to the barricade and
stopped by the double line of sentries stretching on either side up
the mountains, till the flash of the gun barrels was lost in the
flash of the snow. For accidental education the picture had its
value. The earliest of these pictures count for most, as first
impressions must, and Adams never afterwards cared much for landscape
education, except perhaps in the tropics for the sake of the
contrast. As education, that chapter, too, was read, and set
aside.

The handsome blond officers of the Jagers were not to be beaten
in courtesy by the handsome young olive-toned officers of the
Cacciatori. The eternal woman as usual, when she is young, pretty,
and engaging, had her way, and the barricade offered no resistance.
In fifteen minutes the carriage was rolling down to Mals, swarming
with German soldiers and German fleas, worse than the Italian; and
German language, thought, and atmosphere, of which young Adams,
thanks to his glimpse of Italy, never again felt quite the old
confident charm.

Yet he could talk to his cabman and conscientiously did his
cathedrals, his Rhine, and whatever his companions suggested.
Faithful to his self-contracted scheme of passing two winters in
study of the Civil Law, he went back to Dresden with a letter to the
Frau Hofrathin von Reichenbach, in whose house Lowell and other
Americans had pursued studies more or less serious. In those days,
"The Initials" was a new book. The charm which its clever author had
laboriously woven over Munich gave also a certain reflected light to
Dresden. Young Adams had nothing to do but take fencing-lessons,
visit the galleries and go to the theatre; but his social failure in
the line of "The Initials," was humiliating and he succumbed to it.
The Frau Hofrathin herself was sometimes roused to huge laughter at
the total discomfiture and helplessness of the young American in the
face of her society. Possibly an education may be the wider and the
richer for a large experience of the world; Raphael Pumpelly and
Clarence King, at about the same time, were enriching their education
by a picturesque intimacy with the manners of the Apaches and Digger
Indians. All experience is an arch, to build upon. Yet Adams admitted
himself unable to guess what use his second winter in Germany was to
him, or what he expected it to be. Even the doctrine of accidental
education broke down. There were no accidents in Dresden. As soon as
the winter was over, he closed and locked the German door with a long
breath of relief, and took the road to Italy. He had then pursued his
education, as it pleased him, for eighteen months, and in spite of
the infinite variety of new impressions which had packed themselves
into his mind, he knew no more, for his practical purposes, than the
day he graduated. He had made no step towards a profession. He was as
ignorant as a schoolboy of society. He was unfit for any career in
Europe, and unfitted for any career in America, and he had not
natural intelligence enough to see what a mess he had thus far made
of his education.

By twisting life to follow accidental and devious paths, one
might perhaps find some use for accidental and devious knowledge, but
this had been no part of Henry Adams's plan when he chose the path
most admired by the best judges, and followed it till he found it led
nowhere. Nothing had been further from his mind when he started in
November, 1858, than to become a tourist, but a mere tourist, and
nothing else, he had become in April, 1860, when he joined his sister
in Florence. His father had been in the right. The young man felt a
little sore about it. Supposing his father asked him, on his return,
what equivalent he had brought back for the time and money put into
his experiment! The only possible answer would be: "Sir, I am a
tourist! "

The answer was not what he had meant it to be, and he was not
likely to better it by asking his father, in turn, what equivalent
his brothers or cousins or friends at home had got out of the same
time and money spent in Boston. All they had put into the law was
certainly thrown away, but were they happier in science? In theory
one might say, with some show of proof, that a pure, scientific
education was alone correct; yet many of his friends who took it,
found reason to complain that it was anything but a pure, scientific
world in which they lived.

Meanwhile his father had quite enough perplexities of his own,
without seeking more in his son's errors. His Quincy district had
sent him to Congress, and in the spring of 1860 he was in the full
confusion of nominating candidates for the Presidential election in
November. He supported Mr. Seward. The Republican Party was an
unknown force, and the Democratic Party was torn to pieces. No one
could see far into the future. Fathers could blunder as well as sons,
and, in 1860, every one was conscious of being dragged along paths
much less secure than those of the European tourist. For the time,
the young man was safe from interference, and went on his way with a
light heart to take whatever chance fragments of education God or the
devil was pleased to give him, for he knew no longer the good from
the bad.

He had of both sorts more than he knew how to use. Perhaps the
most useful purpose he set himself to serve was that of his pen, for
he wrote long letters, during the next three months, to his brother
Charles, which his brother caused to be printed in the Boston
Courier; and the exercise was good for him. He had little to say, and
said it not very well, but that mattered less. The habit of
expression leads to the search for something to express. Something
remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out
every commonplace in the expression. Young men as a rule saw little
in Italy, or anywhere else, and in after life when Adams began to
learn what some men could see, he shrank into corners of shame at the
thought that he should have betrayed his own inferiority as though it
were his pride, while he invited his neighbors to measure and admire;
but it was still the nearest approach he had yet made to an
intelligent act.

For the rest, Italy was mostly an emotion and the emotion
naturally centred in Rome. The American parent, curiously enough,
while bitterly hostile to Paris, seemed rather disposed to accept
Rome as legitimate education, though abused; but to young men seeking
education in a serious spirit, taking for granted that everything had
a cause, and that nature tended to an end, Rome was altogether the
most violent vice in the world, and Rome before 1870 was seductive
beyond resistance. The month of May, 1860, was divine. No doubt other
young men, and occasionally young women, have passed the month of May
in Rome since then, and conceive that the charm continues to exist.
Possibly it does -- in them -- but in 1860 the lights and shadows
were still mediaeval, and mediaeval Rome was alive; the shadows
breathed and glowed, full of soft forms felt by lost senses. No
sand-blast of science had yet skinned off the epidermis of history,
thought, and feeling. The pictures were uncleaned, the churches
unrestored, the ruins unexcavated. Mediaeval Rome was sorcery. Rome
was the worst spot on earth to teach nineteenth-century youth what to
do with a twentieth-century world. One's emotions in Rome were one's
private affair, like one's glass of absinthe before dinner in the
Palais Royal; they must be hurtful, else they could not have been so
intense; and they were surely immoral, for no one, priest or
politician, could honestly read in the ruins of Rome any other
certain lesson than that they were evidence of the just judgments of
an outraged God against all the doings of man. This moral unfitted
young men for every sort of useful activity; it made Rome a gospel of
anarchy and vice; the last place under the sun for educating the
young; yet it was, by common consent, the only spot that the young --
of either sex and every race -- passionately, perversely, wickedly
loved.

Boys never see a conclusion; only on the edge of the grave can
man conclude anything; but the first impulse given to the boy is apt
to lead or drive him for the rest of his life into conclusion after
conclusion that he never dreamed of reaching. One looked idly enough
at the Forum or at St. Peter's, but one never forgot the look, and it
never ceased reacting. To a young Bostonian, fresh from Germany, Rome
seemed a pure emotion, quite free from economic or actual values, and
he could not in reason or common sense foresee that it was
mechanically piling up conundrum after conundrum in his educational
path, which seemed unconnected but that he had got to connect; that
seemed insoluble but had got to be somehow solved. Rome was not a
beetle to be dissected and dropped; not a bad French novel to be read
in a railway train and thrown out of the window after other bad
French novels, the morals of which could never approach the
immorality of Roman history. Rome was actual; it was England; it was
going to be America. Rome could not be fitted into an orderly,
middle-class, Bostonian, systematic scheme of evolution. No law of
progress applied to it. Not even time-sequences -- the last refuge of
helpless historians -- had value for it. The Forum no more led to the
Vatican than the Vatican to the Forum. Rienzi, Garibaldi, Tiberius
Gracchus, Aurelian might be mixed up in any relation of time, along
with a thousand more, and never lead to a sequence. The great word
Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but
the old religion had preached the same doctrine for a thousand years
without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat
contradiction.

Of course both priests and evolutionists bitterly denied this
heresy, but what they affirmed or denied in 1860 had very little
importance indeed for 1960. Anarchy lost no ground meanwhile. The
problem became only the more fascinating. Probably it was more vital
in May, 1860, than it had been in October, 1764, when the idea of
writing the Decline and Fall of the city first started to the mind of
Gibbon, "in the close of the evening, as I sat musing in the Church
of the Zoccolanti or Franciscan Friars, while they were singing
Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, on the ruins of the Capitol."
Murray's Handbook had the grace to quote this passage from Gibbon's
"Autobiography," which led Adams more than once to sit at sunset on
the steps of the Church of Santa Maria di Ara Coeli, curiously
wondering that not an inch had been gained by Gibbon -- or all the
historians since -- towards explaining the Fall. The mystery remained
unsolved; the charm remained intact. Two great experiments of Western
civilization had left there the chief monuments of their failure, and
nothing proved that the city might not still survive to express the
failure of a third.

The young man had no idea what he was doing. The thought of
posing for a Gibbon never entered his mind. He was a tourist, even to
the depths of his sub-consciousness, and it was well for him that he
should be nothing else, for even the greatest of men cannot sit with
dignity, "in the close of evening, among the ruins of the Capitol,"
unless they have something quite original to say about it. Tacitus
could do it; so could Michael Angelo; and so, at a pinch, could
Gibbon, though in figure hardly heroic; but, in sum, none of them
could say very much more than the tourist, who went on repeating to
himself the eternal question: -- Why! Why!! Why!!! -- as his
neighbor, the blind beggar, might do, sitting next him, on the church
steps. No one ever had answered the question to the satisfaction of
any one else; yet every one who had either head or heart, felt that
sooner or later he must make up his mind what answer to accept.
Substitute the word America for the word Rome, and the question
became personal.

Perhaps Henry learned something in Rome, though he never knew
it, and never sought it. Rome dwarfs teachers. The greatest men of
the age scarcely bore the test of posing with Rome for a background.
Perhaps Garibaldi -- possibly even Cavour -- could have sat "in the
close of the evening, among the ruins of the Capitol," but one hardly
saw Napoleon III there, or Palmerston or Tennyson or Longfellow. One
morning, Adams happened to be chatting in the studio of Hamilton
Wilde, when a middle-aged Englishman came in, evidently excited, and
told of the shock he had just received, when riding near the Circus
Maximus, at coming unexpectedly on the guillotine, where some
criminal had been put to death an hour or two before. The sudden
surprise had quite overcome him; and Adams, who seldom saw the point
of a story till time had blunted it, listened sympathetically to
learn what new form of grim horror had for the moment wiped out the
memory of two thousand years of Roman bloodshed, or the consolation,
derived from history and statistics, that most citizens of Rome
seemed to be the better for guillotining. Only by slow degrees, he
grappled the conviction that the victim of the shock was Robert
Browning; and, on the background of the Circus Maximus, the Christian
martyrs flaming as torches, and the morning's murderer on the block,
Browning seemed rather in place, as a middle-aged gentlemanly English
Pippa Passes; while afterwards, in the light of Belgravia
dinner-tables, he never made part of his background except by
effacement. Browning might have sat with Gibbon, among the ruins, and
few Romans would have smiled.

Yet Browning never revealed the poetic depths of Saint Francis;
William Story could not touch the secret of Michael Angelo, and
Mommsen hardly said all that one felt by instinct in the lives of
Cicero and Caesar. They taught what, as a rule, needed no teaching,
the lessons of a rather cheap imagination and cheaper politics. Rome
was a bewildering complex of ideas, experiments, ambitions, energies;
without her, the Western world was pointless and fragmentary; she
gave heart and unity to it all; yet Gibbon might have gone on for the
whole century, sitting among the ruins of the Capitol, and no one
would have passed, capable of telling him what it meant. Perhaps it
meant nothing.

So it ended; the happiest month of May that life had yet
offered, fading behind the present, and probably beyond the past,
somewhere into abstract time, grotesquely out of place with the
Berlin scheme or a Boston future. Adams explained to himself that he
was absorbing knowledge. He would have put it better had he said that
knowledge was absorbing him. He was passive. In spite of swarming
impressions he knew no more when he left Rome than he did when he
entered it. As a marketable object, his value was less. His next step
went far to convince him that accidental education, whatever its
economical return might be, was prodigiously successful as an object
in itself. Everything conspired to ruin his sound scheme of life, and
to make him a vagrant as well as pauper. He went on to Naples, and
there, in the hot June, heard rumors that Garibaldi and his thousand
were about to attack Palermo. Calling on the American Minister,
Chandler of Pennsylvania, he was kindly treated, not for his merit,
but for his name, and Mr. Chandler amiably consented to send him to
the seat of war as bearer of despatches to Captain Palmer of the
American sloop of war Iroquois. Young Adams seized the chance, and
went to Palermo in a government transport filled with fleas,
commanded by a charming Prince Caracciolo.

He told all about it to the Boston Courier; where the narrative
probably exists to this day, unless the files of the Courier have
wholly perished; but of its bearing on education the Courier did not
speak. He himself would have much liked to know whether it had any
bearing whatever, and what was its value as a post-graduate course.
Quite apart from its value as life attained, realized, capitalized,
it had also a certain value as a lesson in something, though Adams
could never classify the branch of study. Loosely, the tourist called
it knowledge of men, but it was just the reverse; it was knowledge of
one's ignorance of men. Captain Palmer of the Iroquois, who was a
friend of the young man's uncle, Sydney Brooks, took him with the
officers of the ship to make an evening call on Garibaldi, whom they
found in the Senate House towards sunset, at supper with his
picturesque and piratic staff, in the full noise and color of the
Palermo revolution. As a spectacle, it belonged to Rossini and the
Italian opera, or to Alexandre Dumas at the least, but the spectacle
was not its educational side. Garibaldi left the table, and, sitting
down at the window, had a few words of talk with Captain Palmer and
young Adams. At that moment, in the summer of 1860, Garibaldi was
certainly the most serious of the doubtful energies in the world; the
most essential to gauge rightly. Even then society was dividing
between banker and anarchist. One or the other, Garibaldi must serve.
Himself a typical anarchist, sure to overshadow Europe and alarm
empires bigger than Naples, his success depended on his mind; his
energy was beyond doubt.

Adams had the chance to look this sphinx in the eyes, and, for
five minutes, to watch him like a wild animal, at the moment of his
greatest achievement and most splendid action. One saw a
quiet-featured, quiet-voiced man in a red flannel shirt; absolutely
impervious; a type of which Adams knew nothing. Sympathetic it was,
and one felt that it was simple; one suspected even that it might be
childlike, but could form no guess of its intelligence. In his own
eyes Garibaldi might be a Napoleon or a Spartacus; in the hands of
Cavour he might become a Condottiere; in the eyes of history he
might, like the rest of the world, be only the vigorous player in the
game he did not understand. The student was none the wiser.

This compound nature of patriot and pirate had illumined Italian
history from the beginning, and was no more intelligible to itself
than to a young American who had no experience in double natures. In
the end, if the "Autobiography" tells truth, Garibaldi saw and said
that he had not understood his own acts; that he had been an
instrument; that he had served the purposes of the class he least
wanted to help; yet in 1860 he thought himself the revolution
anarchic, Napoleonic, and his ambition was unbounded. What should a
young Bostonian have made of a character like this, internally alive
with childlike fancies, and externally quiet, simple, almost
innocent; uttering with apparent conviction the usual commonplaces of
popular politics that all politicians use as the small change of
their intercourse with the public; but never betraying a thought?

Precisely this class of mind was to be the toughest problem of
Adams's practical life, but he could never make anything of it. The
lesson of Garibaldi, as education, seemed to teach the extreme
complexity of extreme simplicity; but one could have learned this
from a glow-worm. One did not need the vivid recollection of the
low-voiced, simple-mannered, seafaring captain of Genoese adventurers
and Sicilian brigands, supping in the July heat and Sicilian dirt and
revolutionary clamor, among the barricaded streets of insurgent
Palermo, merely in order to remember that simplicity is complex.

Adams left the problem as he found it, and came north to stumble
over others, less picturesque but nearer. He squandered two or three
months on Paris. From the first he had avoided Paris, and had wanted
no French influence in his education. He disapproved of France in the
lump. A certain knowledge of the language one must have; enough to
order dinner and buy a theatre ticket; but more he did not seek. He
disliked the Empire and the Emperor particularly, but this was a
trifle; he disliked most the French mind. To save himself the trouble
of drawing up a long list of all that he disliked, he disapproved of
the whole, once for all, and shut them figuratively out of his life.
France was not serious, and he was not serious in going there.

He did this in good faith, obeying the lessons his teachers had
taught him; but the curious result followed that, being in no way
responsible for the French and sincerely disapproving them, he felt
quite at liberty to enjoy to the full everything he disapproved.
Stated thus crudely, the idea sounds derisive; but, as a matter of
fact, several thousand Americans passed much of their time there on
this understanding. They sought to take share in every function that
was open to approach, as they sought tickets to the opera, because
they were not a part of it. Adams did like the rest. All thought of
serious education had long vanished. He tried to acquire a few French
idioms, without even aspiring to master a subjunctive, but he
succeeded better in acquiring a modest taste for Bordeaux and
Burgundy and one or two sauces; for the Trois Freres Provencaux and
Voisin's and Philippe's and the Cafe Anglais; for the Palais Royal
Theatre, and the Varietes and the Gymnase; for the Brohans and
Bressant, Rose Cheri and Gil Perez, and other lights of the stage.
His friends were good to him. Life was amusing. Paris rapidly became
familiar. In a month or six weeks he forgot even to disapprove of it;
but he studied nothing, entered no society, and made no acquaintance.
Accidental education went far in Paris, and one picked up a deal of
knowledge that might become useful; perhaps, after all, the three
months passed there might serve better purpose than the twenty-one
months passed elsewhere; but he did not intend it -- did not think it
-- and looked at it as a momentary and frivolous vacation before
going home to fit himself for life. Therewith, after staying as long
as he could and spending all the money he dared, he started with
mixed emotions but no education, for home.