| CHAPTER VI
| -1 | |
| ROME (1859-1860)
| 0 | |
| THE tramp in Thuringen lasted four-and-twenty hours. By the end
of the first walk, his three companions -- John Bancroft, James
J. Higginson, and B. W. Crowninshield, all Boston and Harvard
College like himself -- were satisfied with what they had seen,
and when they sat down to rest on the spot where Goethe had
written --
| 1 | |
"Warte nur! balde
Rubest du auch! " --
| 2 | |
| the profoundness of the thought and the wisdom of the advice
affected them so strongly that they hired a wagon and drove to
Weimar the same night. They were all quite happy and lighthearted
in the first fresh breath of leafless spring, and the beer was
better than at Berlin, but they were all equally in doubt why
they had come to Germany, and not one of them could say why they
stayed. Adams stayed because he did not want to go home, and he
had fears that his father's patience might be exhausted if he
asked to waste time elsewhere.
| 3 | |
| They could not think that their education required a return to
Berlin. A few days at Dresden in the spring weather satisfied
them that Dresden was a better spot for general education than
Berlin, and equally good for reading Civil Law. They were
possibly right. There was nothing to study in Dresden, and no
education to be gained, but the Sistine Madonna and the
Correggios were famous; the theatre and opera were sometimes
excellent, and the Elbe was prettier than the Spree. They could
always fall back on the language. So he took a room in the
household of the usual small government clerk with the usual
plain daughters, and continued the study of the language.
Possibly one might learn something more by accident, as one had
learned something of Beethoven. For the next eighteen months the
young man pursued accidental education, since he could pursue no
other; and by great good fortune, Europe and America were too
busy with their own affairs to give much attention to his.
Accidental education had every chance in its favor, especially
because nothing came amiss.
| 4 | |
| Perhaps the chief obstacle to the youth's education, now that
he had come of age, was his honesty; his simple-minded faith in
his intentions. Even after Berlin had become a nightmare, he
still persuaded himself that his German education was a success.
He loved, or thought he loved the people, but the Germany he
loved was the eighteenth-century which the Germans were ashamed
of, and were destroying as fast as they could. Of the Germany to
come, he knew nothing. Military Germany was his abhorrence. What
he liked was the simple character; the good-natured sentiment;
the musical and metaphysical abstraction; the blundering
incapacity of the German for practical affairs. At that time
everyone looked on Germany as incapable of competing with France,
England or America in any sort of organized energy. Germany had
no confidence in herself, and no reason to feel it. She had no
unity, and no reason to want it. She never had unity. Her
religious and social history, her economical interests, her
military geography, her political convenience, had always tended
to eccentric rather than concentric motion. Until coal-power and
railways were created, she was mediaeval by nature and geography,
and this was what Adams, under the teachings of Carlyle and
Lowell, liked.
| 5 | |
| He was in a fair way to do himself lasting harm, floundering
between worlds passed and worlds coming, which had a habit of
crushing men who stayed too long at the points of contact.
Suddenly the Emperor Napoleon declared war on Austria and raised
a confused point of morals in the mind of Europe. France was the
nightmare of Germany, and even at Dresden one looked on the
return of Napoleon to Leipsic as the most likely thing in the
world. One morning the government clerk, in whose family Adams
was staying, rushed into his room to consult a map in order that
he might measure the distance from Milan to Dresden. The third
Napoleon had reached Lombardy, and only fifty or sixty years had
passed since the first Napoleon had begun his military successes
from an Italian base.
| 6 | |
| An enlightened young American, with eighteenth-century tastes
capped by fragments of a German education and the most excellent
intentions, had to make up his mind about the moral value of
these conflicting forces. France was the wicked spirit of moral
politics, and whatever helped France must be so far evil. At that
time Austria was another evil spirit. Italy was the prize they
disputed, and for at least fifteen hundred years had been the
chief object of their greed. The question of sympathy had
disturbed a number of persons during that period. The question of
morals had been put in a number of cross-lights. Should one be
Guelph or Ghibelline? No doubt, one was wiser than one's
neighbors who had found no way of settling this question since
the days of the cave-dwellers, but ignorance did better to
discard the attempt to be wise, for wisdom had been singularly
baffled by the problem. Better take sides first, and reason about
it for the rest of life.
| 7 | |
| Not that Adams felt any real doubt about his sympathies or
wishes. He had not been German long enough for befogging his mind
to that point, but the moment was decisive for much to come,
especially for political morals. His morals were the highest, and
he clung to them to preserve his self-respect; but steam and
electricity had brought about new political and social
concentrations, or were making them necessary in the line of his
moral principles -- freedom, education, economic development and
so forth -- which required association with allies as doubtful as
Napoleon III, and robberies with violence on a very extensive
scale. As long as he could argue that his opponents were wicked,
he could join in robbing and killing them without a qualm; but it
might happen that the good were robbed. Education insisted on
finding a moral foundation for robbery. He could hope to begin
life in the character of no animal more moral than a monkey
unless he could satisfy himself when and why robbery and murder
were a virtue and duty. Education founded on mere self-interest
was merely Guelph and Ghibelline over again -- Machiavelli
translated into American.
| 8 | |
| Luckily for him he had a sister much brighter than he ever was
-- though he thought himself a rather superior person -- who
after marrying Charles Kuhn, of Philadelphia, had come to Italy,
and, like all good Americans and English, was hotly Italian. In
July, 1859, she was at Thun in Switzerland, and there Henry Adams
joined them. Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense;
that which they will, is right; that which they reject, is wrong;
and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral. Mrs.
Kuhn had a double superiority. She not only adored Italy, but she
cordially disliked Germany in all its varieties. She saw no gain
in helping her brother to be Germanized, and she wanted him much
to be civilized. She was the first young woman he was ever
intimate with -- quick, sensitive, wilful, or full of will,
energetic, sympathetic and intelligent enough to supply a score
of men with ideas -- and he was delighted to give her the reins
-- to let her drive him where she would. It was his first
experiment in giving the reins to a woman, and he was so much
pleased with the results that he never wanted to take them back.
In after life he made a general law of experience -- no woman had
ever driven him wrong; no man had ever driven him right.
| 9 | |
| Nothing would satisfy Mrs. Kuhn but to go to the seat of war as
soon as the armistice was declared. Wild as the idea seemed,
nothing was easier. The party crossed the St. Gothard and reached
Milan, picturesque with every sort of uniform and every sign of
war. To young Adams this first plunge into Italy passed Beethoven
as a piece of accidental education. Like music, it differed from
other education in being, not a means of pursuing life, but one
of the ends attained. Further, on these lines, one could not go.
It had but one defect -- that of attainment. Life had no richer
impression to give; it offers barely half-a-dozen such, and the
intervals seem long. Exactly what they teach would puzzle a
Berlin jurist; yet they seem to have an economic value, since
most people would decline to part with even their faded memories
except at a valuation ridiculously extravagant. They were also
what men pay most for; but one's ideas become hopelessly mixed in
trying to reduce such forms of education to a standard of
exchangeable value, and, as in political economy, one had best
disregard altogether what cannot be stated in equivalents. The
proper equivalent of pleasure is pain, which is also a form of
education.
| 10 | |
| Not satisfied with Milan, Mrs. Kuhn insisted on invading the
enemy's country, and the carriage was chartered for Innsbruck by
way of the Stelvio Pass. The Valtellina, as the carriage drove up
it, showed war. Garibaldi's Cacciatori were the only visible
inhabitants. No one could say whether the pass was open, but in
any case no carriage had yet crossed. At the inns the handsome
young officers in command of the detachments were delighted to
accept invitations to dinner and to talk all the evening of their
battles to the charming patriot who sparkled with interest and
flattery, but not one of them knew whether their enemies, the
abhorred Austrian Jagers, would let the travellers through their
lines. As a rule, gaiety was not the character failing in any
party that Mrs. Kuhn belonged to, but when at last, after
climbing what was said to be the finest carriage-pass in Europe,
the carriage turned the last shoulder, where the glacier of the
Ortler Spitze tumbled its huge mass down upon the road, even Mrs.
Kuhn gasped when she was driven directly up to the barricade and
stopped by the double line of sentries stretching on either side
up the mountains, till the flash of the gun barrels was lost in
the flash of the snow. For accidental education the picture had
its value. The earliest of these pictures count for most, as
first impressions must, and Adams never afterwards cared much for
landscape education, except perhaps in the tropics for the sake
of the contrast. As education, that chapter, too, was read, and
set aside.
| 11 | |
| The handsome blond officers of the Jagers were not to be beaten
in courtesy by the handsome young olive-toned officers of the
Cacciatori. The eternal woman as usual, when she is young,
pretty, and engaging, had her way, and the barricade offered no
resistance. In fifteen minutes the carriage was rolling down to
Mals, swarming with German soldiers and German fleas, worse than
the Italian; and German language, thought, and atmosphere, of
which young Adams, thanks to his glimpse of Italy, never again
felt quite the old confident charm.
| 12 | |
| Yet he could talk to his cabman and conscientiously did his
cathedrals, his Rhine, and whatever his companions suggested.
Faithful to his self-contracted scheme of passing two winters in
study of the Civil Law, he went back to Dresden with a letter to
the Frau Hofrathin von Reichenbach, in whose house Lowell and
other Americans had pursued studies more or less serious. In
those days, "The Initials" was a new book. The charm which its
clever author had laboriously woven over Munich gave also a
certain reflected light to Dresden. Young Adams had nothing to do
but take fencing-lessons, visit the galleries and go to the
theatre; but his social failure in the line of "The Initials,"
was humiliating and he succumbed to it. The Frau Hofrathin
herself was sometimes roused to huge laughter at the total
discomfiture and helplessness of the young American in the face
of her society. Possibly an education may be the wider and the
richer for a large experience of the world; Raphael Pumpelly and
Clarence King, at about the same time, were enriching their
education by a picturesque intimacy with the manners of the
Apaches and Digger Indians. All experience is an arch, to build
upon. Yet Adams admitted himself unable to guess what use his
second winter in Germany was to him, or what he expected it to
be. Even the doctrine of accidental education broke down. There
were no accidents in Dresden. As soon as the winter was over, he
closed and locked the German door with a long breath of relief,
and took the road to Italy. He had then pursued his education, as
it pleased him, for eighteen months, and in spite of the infinite
variety of new impressions which had packed themselves into his
mind, he knew no more, for his practical purposes, than the day
he graduated. He had made no step towards a profession. He was as
ignorant as a schoolboy of society. He was unfit for any career
in Europe, and unfitted for any career in America, and he had not
natural intelligence enough to see what a mess he had thus far
made of his education.
| 13 | |
| By twisting life to follow accidental and devious paths, one
might perhaps find some use for accidental and devious knowledge,
but this had been no part of Henry Adams's plan when he chose the
path most admired by the best judges, and followed it till he
found it led nowhere. Nothing had been further from his mind when
he started in November, 1858, than to become a tourist, but a
mere tourist, and nothing else, he had become in April, 1860,
when he joined his sister in Florence. His father had been in the
right. The young man felt a little sore about it. Supposing his
father asked him, on his return, what equivalent he had brought
back for the time and money put into his experiment! The only
possible answer would be: "Sir, I am a tourist! "
| 14 | |
| The answer was not what he had meant it to be, and he was not
likely to better it by asking his father, in turn, what
equivalent his brothers or cousins or friends at home had got out
of the same time and money spent in Boston. All they had put into
the law was certainly thrown away, but were they happier in
science? In theory one might say, with some show of proof, that a
pure, scientific education was alone correct; yet many of his
friends who took it, found reason to complain that it was
anything but a pure, scientific world in which they lived.
| 15 | |
| Meanwhile his father had quite enough perplexities of his own,
without seeking more in his son's errors. His Quincy district had
sent him to Congress, and in the spring of 1860 he was in the
full confusion of nominating candidates for the Presidential
election in November. He supported Mr. Seward. The Republican
Party was an unknown force, and the Democratic Party was torn to
pieces. No one could see far into the future. Fathers could
blunder as well as sons, and, in 1860, every one was conscious of
being dragged along paths much less secure than those of the
European tourist. For the time, the young man was safe from
interference, and went on his way with a light heart to take
whatever chance fragments of education God or the devil was
pleased to give him, for he knew no longer the good from the bad.
| 16 | |
| He had of both sorts more than he knew how to use. Perhaps the
most useful purpose he set himself to serve was that of his pen,
for he wrote long letters, during the next three months, to his
brother Charles, which his brother caused to be printed in the
Boston Courier; and the exercise was good for him. He had little
to say, and said it not very well, but that mattered less. The
habit of expression leads to the search for something to express.
Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one
strikes out every commonplace in the expression. Young men as a
rule saw little in Italy, or anywhere else, and in after life
when Adams began to learn what some men could see, he shrank into
corners of shame at the thought that he should have betrayed his
own inferiority as though it were his pride, while he invited his
neighbors to measure and admire; but it was still the nearest
approach he had yet made to an intelligent act.
| 17 | |
| For the rest, Italy was mostly an emotion and the emotion
naturally centred in Rome. The American parent, curiously enough,
while bitterly hostile to Paris, seemed rather disposed to accept
Rome as legitimate education, though abused; but to young men
seeking education in a serious spirit, taking for granted that
everything had a cause, and that nature tended to an end, Rome
was altogether the most violent vice in the world, and Rome
before 1870 was seductive beyond resistance. The month of May,
1860, was divine. No doubt other young men, and occasionally
young women, have passed the month of May in Rome since then, and
conceive that the charm continues to exist. Possibly it does --
in them -- but in 1860 the lights and shadows were still
mediaeval, and mediaeval Rome was alive; the shadows breathed and
glowed, full of soft forms felt by lost senses. No sand-blast of
science had yet skinned off the epidermis of history, thought,
and feeling. The pictures were uncleaned, the churches
unrestored, the ruins unexcavated. Mediaeval Rome was sorcery.
Rome was the worst spot on earth to teach nineteenth-century
youth what to do with a twentieth-century world. One's emotions
in Rome were one's private affair, like one's glass of absinthe
before dinner in the Palais Royal; they must be hurtful, else
they could not have been so intense; and they were surely
immoral, for no one, priest or politician, could honestly read in
the ruins of Rome any other certain lesson than that they were
evidence of the just judgments of an outraged God against all the
doings of man. This moral unfitted young men for every sort of
useful activity; it made Rome a gospel of anarchy and vice; the
last place under the sun for educating the young; yet it was, by
common consent, the only spot that the young -- of either sex and
every race -- passionately, perversely, wickedly loved.
| 18 | |
| Boys never see a conclusion; only on the edge of the grave can
man conclude anything; but the first impulse given to the boy is
apt to lead or drive him for the rest of his life into conclusion
after conclusion that he never dreamed of reaching. One looked
idly enough at the Forum or at St. Peter's, but one never forgot
the look, and it never ceased reacting. To a young Bostonian,
fresh from Germany, Rome seemed a pure emotion, quite free from
economic or actual values, and he could not in reason or common
sense foresee that it was mechanically piling up conundrum after
conundrum in his educational path, which seemed unconnected but
that he had got to connect; that seemed insoluble but had got to
be somehow solved. Rome was not a beetle to be dissected and
dropped; not a bad French novel to be read in a railway train and
thrown out of the window after other bad French novels, the
morals of which could never approach the immorality of Roman
history. Rome was actual; it was England; it was going to be
America. Rome could not be fitted into an orderly, middle-class,
Bostonian, systematic scheme of evolution. No law of progress
applied to it. Not even time-sequences -- the last refuge of
helpless historians -- had value for it. The Forum no more led to
the Vatican than the Vatican to the Forum. Rienzi, Garibaldi,
Tiberius Gracchus, Aurelian might be mixed up in any relation of
time, along with a thousand more, and never lead to a sequence.
The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new
religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same
doctrine for a thousand years without finding in the entire
history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.
| 19 | |
| Of course both priests and evolutionists bitterly denied this
heresy, but what they affirmed or denied in 1860 had very little
importance indeed for 1960. Anarchy lost no ground meanwhile. The
problem became only the more fascinating. Probably it was more
vital in May, 1860, than it had been in October, 1764, when the
idea of writing the Decline and Fall of the city first started to
the mind of Gibbon, "in the close of the evening, as I sat musing
in the Church of the Zoccolanti or Franciscan Friars, while they
were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, on the ruins of
the Capitol." Murray's Handbook had the grace to quote this
passage from Gibbon's "Autobiography," which led Adams more than
once to sit at sunset on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria
di Ara Coeli, curiously wondering that not an inch had been
gained by Gibbon -- or all the historians since -- towards
explaining the Fall. The mystery remained unsolved; the charm
remained intact. Two great experiments of Western civilization
had left there the chief monuments of their failure, and nothing
proved that the city might not still survive to express the
failure of a third.
| 20 | |
| The young man had no idea what he was doing. The thought of
posing for a Gibbon never entered his mind. He was a tourist,
even to the depths of his sub-consciousness, and it was well for
him that he should be nothing else, for even the greatest of men
cannot sit with dignity, "in the close of evening, among the
ruins of the Capitol," unless they have something quite original
to say about it. Tacitus could do it; so could Michael Angelo;
and so, at a pinch, could Gibbon, though in figure hardly heroic;
but, in sum, none of them could say very much more than the
tourist, who went on repeating to himself the eternal question:
-- Why! Why!! Why!!! -- as his neighbor, the blind beggar, might
do, sitting next him, on the church steps. No one ever had
answered the question to the satisfaction of any one else; yet
every one who had either head or heart, felt that sooner or later
he must make up his mind what answer to accept. Substitute the
word America for the word Rome, and the question became personal.
| 21 | |
| Perhaps Henry learned something in Rome, though he never knew
it, and never sought it. Rome dwarfs teachers. The greatest men
of the age scarcely bore the test of posing with Rome for a
background. Perhaps Garibaldi -- possibly even Cavour -- could
have sat "in the close of the evening, among the ruins of the
Capitol," but one hardly saw Napoleon III there, or Palmerston or
Tennyson or Longfellow. One morning, Adams happened to be
chatting in the studio of Hamilton Wilde, when a middle-aged
Englishman came in, evidently excited, and told of the shock he
had just received, when riding near the Circus Maximus, at coming
unexpectedly on the guillotine, where some criminal had been put
to death an hour or two before. The sudden surprise had quite
overcome him; and Adams, who seldom saw the point of a story till
time had blunted it, listened sympathetically to learn what new
form of grim horror had for the moment wiped out the memory of
two thousand years of Roman bloodshed, or the consolation,
derived from history and statistics, that most citizens of Rome
seemed to be the better for guillotining. Only by slow degrees,
he grappled the conviction that the victim of the shock was
Robert Browning; and, on the background of the Circus Maximus,
the Christian martyrs flaming as torches, and the morning's
murderer on the block, Browning seemed rather in place, as a
middle-aged gentlemanly English Pippa Passes; while afterwards,
in the light of Belgravia dinner-tables, he never made part of
his background except by effacement. Browning might have sat with
Gibbon, among the ruins, and few Romans would have smiled.
| 22 | |
| Yet Browning never revealed the poetic depths of Saint Francis;
William Story could not touch the secret of Michael Angelo, and
Mommsen hardly said all that one felt by instinct in the lives of
Cicero and Caesar. They taught what, as a rule, needed no
teaching, the lessons of a rather cheap imagination and cheaper
politics. Rome was a bewildering complex of ideas, experiments,
ambitions, energies; without her, the Western world was pointless
and fragmentary; she gave heart and unity to it all; yet Gibbon
might have gone on for the whole century, sitting among the ruins
of the Capitol, and no one would have passed, capable of telling
him what it meant. Perhaps it meant nothing.
| 23 | |
| So it ended; the happiest month of May that life had yet
offered, fading behind the present, and probably beyond the past,
somewhere into abstract time, grotesquely out of place with the
Berlin scheme or a Boston future. Adams explained to himself that
he was absorbing knowledge. He would have put it better had he
said that knowledge was absorbing him. He was passive. In spite
of swarming impressions he knew no more when he left Rome than he
did when he entered it. As a marketable object, his value was
less. His next step went far to convince him that accidental
education, whatever its economical return might be, was
prodigiously successful as an object in itself. Everything
conspired to ruin his sound scheme of life, and to make him a
vagrant as well as pauper. He went on to Naples, and there, in
the hot June, heard rumors that Garibaldi and his thousand were
about to attack Palermo. Calling on the American Minister,
Chandler of Pennsylvania, he was kindly treated, not for his
merit, but for his name, and Mr. Chandler amiably consented to
send him to the seat of war as bearer of despatches to Captain
Palmer of the American sloop of war Iroquois. Young Adams seized
the chance, and went to Palermo in a government transport filled
with fleas, commanded by a charming Prince Caracciolo.
| 24 | |
| He told all about it to the Boston Courier; where the narrative
probably exists to this day, unless the files of the Courier have
wholly perished; but of its bearing on education the Courier did
not speak. He himself would have much liked to know whether it
had any bearing whatever, and what was its value as a
post-graduate course. Quite apart from its value as life
attained, realized, capitalized, it had also a certain value as a
lesson in something, though Adams could never classify the branch
of study. Loosely, the tourist called it knowledge of men, but it
was just the reverse; it was knowledge of one's ignorance of men.
Captain Palmer of the Iroquois, who was a friend of the young
man's uncle, Sydney Brooks, took him with the officers of the
ship to make an evening call on Garibaldi, whom they found in the
Senate House towards sunset, at supper with his picturesque and
piratic staff, in the full noise and color of the Palermo
revolution. As a spectacle, it belonged to Rossini and the
Italian opera, or to Alexandre Dumas at the least, but the
spectacle was not its educational side. Garibaldi left the table,
and, sitting down at the window, had a few words of talk with
Captain Palmer and young Adams. At that moment, in the summer of
1860, Garibaldi was certainly the most serious of the doubtful
energies in the world; the most essential to gauge rightly. Even
then society was dividing between banker and anarchist. One or
the other, Garibaldi must serve. Himself a typical anarchist,
sure to overshadow Europe and alarm empires bigger than Naples,
his success depended on his mind; his energy was beyond doubt.
| 25 | |
| Adams had the chance to look this sphinx in the eyes, and, for
five minutes, to watch him like a wild animal, at the moment of
his greatest achievement and most splendid action. One saw a
quiet-featured, quiet-voiced man in a red flannel shirt;
absolutely impervious; a type of which Adams knew nothing.
Sympathetic it was, and one felt that it was simple; one
suspected even that it might be childlike, but could form no
guess of its intelligence. In his own eyes Garibaldi might be a
Napoleon or a Spartacus; in the hands of Cavour he might become a
Condottiere; in the eyes of history he might, like the rest of
the world, be only the vigorous player in the game he did not
understand. The student was none the wiser.
| 26 | |
| This compound nature of patriot and pirate had illumined
Italian history from the beginning, and was no more intelligible
to itself than to a young American who had no experience in
double natures. In the end, if the "Autobiography" tells truth,
Garibaldi saw and said that he had not understood his own acts;
that he had been an instrument; that he had served the purposes
of the class he least wanted to help; yet in 1860 he thought
himself the revolution anarchic, Napoleonic, and his ambition was
unbounded. What should a young Bostonian have made of a character
like this, internally alive with childlike fancies, and
externally quiet, simple, almost innocent; uttering with apparent
conviction the usual commonplaces of popular politics that all
politicians use as the small change of their intercourse with the
public; but never betraying a thought?
| 27 | |
| Precisely this class of mind was to be the toughest problem of
Adams's practical life, but he could never make anything of it.
The lesson of Garibaldi, as education, seemed to teach the
extreme complexity of extreme simplicity; but one could have
learned this from a glow-worm. One did not need the vivid
recollection of the low-voiced, simple-mannered, seafaring
captain of Genoese adventurers and Sicilian brigands, supping in
the July heat and Sicilian dirt and revolutionary clamor, among
the barricaded streets of insurgent Palermo, merely in order to
remember that simplicity is complex.
| 28 | |
| Adams left the problem as he found it, and came north to
stumble over others, less picturesque but nearer. He squandered
two or three months on Paris. From the first he had avoided
Paris, and had wanted no French influence in his education. He
disapproved of France in the lump. A certain knowledge of the
language one must have; enough to order dinner and buy a theatre
ticket; but more he did not seek. He disliked the Empire and the
Emperor particularly, but this was a trifle; he disliked most the
French mind. To save himself the trouble of drawing up a long
list of all that he disliked, he disapproved of the whole, once
for all, and shut them figuratively out of his life. France was
not serious, and he was not serious in going there.
| 29 | |
| He did this in good faith, obeying the lessons his teachers had
taught him; but the curious result followed that, being in no way
responsible for the French and sincerely disapproving them, he
felt quite at liberty to enjoy to the full everything he
disapproved. Stated thus crudely, the idea sounds derisive; but,
as a matter of fact, several thousand Americans passed much of
their time there on this understanding. They sought to take share
in every function that was open to approach, as they sought
tickets to the opera, because they were not a part of it. Adams
did like the rest. All thought of serious education had long
vanished. He tried to acquire a few French idioms, without even
aspiring to master a subjunctive, but he succeeded better in
acquiring a modest taste for Bordeaux and Burgundy and one or two
sauces; for the Trois Freres Provencaux and Voisin's and
Philippe's and the Cafe Anglais; for the Palais Royal Theatre,
and the Varietes and the Gymnase; for the Brohans and Bressant,
Rose Cheri and Gil Perez, and other lights of the stage. His
friends were good to him. Life was amusing. Paris rapidly became
familiar. In a month or six weeks he forgot even to disapprove of
it; but he studied nothing, entered no society, and made no
acquaintance. Accidental education went far in Paris, and one
picked up a deal of knowledge that might become useful; perhaps,
after all, the three months passed there might serve better
purpose than the twenty-one months passed elsewhere; but he did
not intend it -- did not think it -- and looked at it as a
momentary and frivolous vacation before going home to fit himself
for life. Therewith, after staying as long as he could and
spending all the money he dared, he started with mixed emotions
but no education, for home.
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