 overnight, and the next day there was talk of him,
and of the resources of his art displayed by Armand Dehors on his hearing that
he was to minister to the tastes of a gathering of hommes d'esprit. Sir
Willoughby glanced at Dehors with his customary benevolent irony in speaking of
the persons, great in their way, who served him. »Why he cannot give us daily so
good a dinner, one must, I suppose, go to French nature to learn. The French are
in the habit of making up for all their deficiencies with enthusiasm. They have
no reverence; if I had said to him, I want something particularly excellent,
Dehors, I should have had a commonplace dinner. But they have enthusiasm on
draught, and that is what we must pull at. Know one Frenchman and you know
France. I have had Dehors under my eye two years, and I can mount his enthusiasm
at a word. He took hommes d'esprit to denote men of letters. Frenchmen have
destroyed their nobility, so, for the sake of excitement, they put up the
literary man - not to worship him; that they can't do; it's to put themselves in
a state of effervescence. They will not have real greatness above them, so they
have sham. That they may justly call it equality, perhaps! Ay, for all your
shake of the head, my good Vernon! You see, human nature comes round again, try
as we may to upset it, and the French only differ from us in wading through
blood to discover that they are at their old trick once more: I am your equal,
sir, your born equal. Oh! you are a man of letters? Allow me to be in a bubble
about you. Yes, Vernon, and I believe the fellow looks up to you as the head of
the establishment. I am not jealous. Provided he attends to his functions!
There's a French philosopher who's for naming the days of the year after the
birthdays of French men of letters, Voltaire-day, Rousseau-day, Racine-day, so
on. Perhaps Vernon will inform us who takes April 1st.«
    »A few trifling errors are of no consequence when you are in the vein of
satire,« said Vernon. »Be satisfied with knowing a nation in the person of a
cook.«
    »They may be reading us English off in a jockey!« said Dr. Middleton. »I
believe that jockeys are the exchange we make for cooks; and our neighbours
