Crack, crack----crack, crack----crack, crack----so this is _Paris!_
quoth I (continuing in the same mood)--and this is _Paris!_----humph!
----_Paris!_ cried I, repeating the name the third time----
The first, the finest, the most brilliant----
The streets however are nasty.
But it looks, I suppose, better than it smells----crack, crack----crack,
crack----what a fuss thou makest! --as if it concerned the good people
to be informed, that a man with pale face and clad in black, had the
honour to be driven into _Paris_ at nine o’clock at night, by a
postilion in a tawny yellow jerkin, turned up with red calamanco--crack,
crack----crack, crack----crack, crack, ----I wish thy whip----
----But ’tis the spirit of thy nation; so crack--crack on.
Ha! ----and no one gives the wall! ----but in the SCHOOL of URBANITY
herself, if the walls are besh-t--how can you do otherwise?
And prithee when do they light the lamps? What? --never in the summer
months! ----Ho! ’tis the time of sallads. ----O rare! sallad and
soup--soup and sallad--sallad and soup, _encore_----
----’Tis _too much_ for sinners.
Now I cannot bear the barbarity of it; how can that unconscionable
coachman talk so much bawdy to that lean horse? don’t you see, friend,
the streets are so villainously narrow, that there is not room in all
_Paris_ to turn a wheelbarrow? In the grandest city of the whole world,
it would not have been amiss, if they had been left a thought wider;
nay, were it only so much in every single street, as that a man might
know (was it only for satisfaction) on which side of it he was walking.
One--two--three--four--five--six--seven--eight--nine--ten. --Ten cook’s
shops! and twice the number of barbers! and all within three minutes
driving! one would think that all the cooks in the world, on some great
merry-meeting with the barbers, by joint consent had said --Come, let us
all go live at _Paris_: the _French_ love good eating----they are all
_gourmands_----we shall rank high; if their god is their belly----their
cooks must be gentlemen: and forasmuch as _the periwig maketh the man_,
and the periwig-maker maketh the periwig--_ergo_, would the barbers say,
we shall rank higher still--we shall be above you all--we shall be
_Capitouls_[7.2] at least--_pardi!_ we shall all wear swords----
--And so, one would swear (that is, by candle light, --but there is no
depending upon it) they continue to do, to this day.
[Footnote 7.2: Chief Magistrate in Toulouse, &c. &c. &c.]