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66 their ways and words. This came from another reminiscence of my childhood. For the first book in which I learned to read French was the Fables of Lafontaine, in which the naively sensible phrases made such an ineffaceable impression on my memory that, when I came to Paris and heard French spoken everywhere, I continually recalled the old stories. It seemed to me that I heard the well-known voices of the animals; now the lion spoke, then the wolf, then the lamb, or the stork, or the dove—ever and anon master fox, and in memory many a time I heard—

"Such reminiscences of fables awoke in my soul much oftener when I in Paris frequented the higher regions, which men called the world. For this was specially the world which supplied Lafontaine with the types of his animal characters. The winter season began soon after my arrival in Paris, and I took part in the salon life in which that world moves more or less merrily. What struck me as most interesting in this world was not the equality as regards refined politeness which prevails in it, so much as the difference in its elements. Very often, when I in a grand salon looked round on the