By the side of fools (says the bourgeois physiologist) there are in this world quarter fools, third part fools, and half fools, who live with one another, seeking one another's society, and carefully eschewing that of less or greater fools, considering themselves particularly happy in the possession of a moiety of human reason, by the side of others who have only a third or a fourth part. They are like those poor afflicted patients who complacently comfort one another at Eaux Bonnes: those who have only one lung and a half looking with pity not unmingled with contempt upon those who have only one, and sometimes even the half of one.
I have dined assiduously every day (we are at a loss to discover whether the epithet assiduously applies to the eating or the attendance) for more than two years at Véry's. I used to arrive at the same hour and to take my place at the same table. I had for neighbour for some months an Englishman, who was as punctual and as regular as I was. One day my neighbour bade me good-by. "I am going," he said, "to embark, to make a little tour round the world." At the expiration of eighteen months, on his return to Paris, he found me, as if by appointment, at the same hour at the same table. He had been round the world, whilst I had scarcely moved from the same place.
Nevertheless, by dining for long periods at a time at different restaurants, I have been able to make the grand tour of human intelligence, and especially of those four thousand opulent and idle men of whom Byron speaks, who pass the whole of their lives, in running after pleasures of five minutes' duration, and for whom the world is made.
The Parisian sometimes boasts of his native eccentricities, but it will infallibly be found that when he wants to depict an excessive case he selects an Englishman for his type. The above is by no means the only instance of Dr. Véron's national failing that way.
I was introduced (he relates) at the Count Torreno's, former minister of Queen Christina's, and who died of carbuncle at Paris, to an Englishman and his wife, who were immensely wealthy, and only resided a few days in Paris, travelling the remainder of the time in France; they loved nothing but the bottle, and never left the table till they had lost their senses. In their travels, their only object was to seek for rich slopes and hill-sides, and their sojourn in a place was regulated by the quality and the renown of the growths of the vine.
The bourgeois physiologist distinguishes between what he calls ivrognes (sots?) and soûlards (drunkards?). This amiable couple, who disdained even Paris for the slopes of the Dordogne, were soûlards, not ivrognes. But he says he has known many soûlards, chiefly jeunes grands seigneurs ("his friends," says the memorialist of Bilboquet, "are always the most distinguished men and women of his time"), who got brutalised upon brandy or absinthe. Those who get drunk upon absinthe attain a pitch of folly so singularly developed, that it is known as the folly of the Absinthiers. One of these unfortunates used to say: "I never taste what I eat, I only taste what I drink." "During my directorship of the Opera," says Dr. Véron, "I was intimate with one of these drunken young lords. He used to give the same orders to seven or eight hackney carriages, so that he should be accompanied by seven or eight vehicles to a pot-house outside the barrière, where he would pass the night in drinking brandy and brutalising himself amidst drunken companions."
The doctor goes on to remark, that drunkenness is not merely a vice, it is also a disease, and a change of habits cannot be suddenly brought
