Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III A GLIMPSE OF PARIS SOCIAL LIFE Our balcony, with its varied views, its easy prospect of the usual life below, and of the soldiers who so often came there to drill under the trees, was a constant pleasure to us. We did not go to the great galleries, to the Louvre and the like anywhere near so often as we had expected. We had thought we should spend almost all our time there; but somehow, when you are a householder you put those things off; it is only the travellers who do them conscientiously. I broke away sometimes to the lectures of Renan and other great names at the Sorbonne and the College de France, freely open to all. The accommodations were stuffy, the benches hard, and you were surprised that proceedings the fame of which had reverberated so far should go on in such cheap and Spartan-like surroundings; but this was soon forgotten, and the intellectual treat was, by force of contrast, perhaps even greater than if delivered'amid the luxurious American school fittings and appliances. In some of these lecture-rooms there was standing-room only, and one, where Professor Deschanel discoursed on the French literature and language, I recollect as so packed on my arrival, fifteen minutes before the hour, that the doors could not even be opened. The amiable custodian said you must come an hour before the time to get a place. I saw some little of the distinguished people who make the Revue des Deux Mondcs, in the charming Empire hotel, once that of Eugene Beauharnais, where Madame Buloz gives them delightful music. And I saw something of Daudet, then weak and suffering, and writing his play " The Struggle for Life," the title of which had an almost alarming pertinence. Then a little son was born to us, our first child, and was duly inspected, registered, and cert...