at Distributed Proofreaders tonight:

[just the one page, as I'm given it to work on]

…spoke of principles as old as his toilet. He was reading, too, a loyal paper, loyal, at least, in those days,—the Journal des Debats. Bowing, as we passed, he consigned us, with a graceful wave of the hand, to the care of Pierre, the frotteur. I took him for some fragment of a duc et pair of the old school; but, on putting the question to the frotteur, who himself might have passed for a figurante at the opera, he informed us that he was ‘Notre bourgeois,’ the master of the hotel.” It is quite wonderful to us how Miladi could have survived to relate so shocking a metamorphosis. Ovid has nothing half so strange and heart-rending.

The instances we have mentioned are far from being the only ones in which her Ladyship was “put out of sorts” by the Anglomania, which, she would make us believe, is operating at present as great a revolution in the social, as was effected in ‘98 in the political condition of France. All along the road from Calais to Paris, she sees nothing but “youths galloping their horses in the cavalry costume of Hyde Park,” “smart gigs and natty dennets,” “cottages of gentility, with white walls and green shutters, and neat offices, rivalling the diversified orders of the Wyatvilles of Islington and Highgate,” in short, nothing but “English neatness and propriety on every side,” with one terrible exception, however, “an Irish jaunting car!” of which she chanced, to her infinite dismay, to catch a glimpse. The second appearance that she makes in the streets of Paris, is for the purpose of buying some “bonbons, diablotins en papillotes, Pastilles de Nantes, and other sugared prettinesses,” for which Parisian confectioners are so renowned. Accordingly, she goes into a shop where she supposes that “fanciful idealities, sweet nothings, candied epics and eclogues in spun sugar, so light, and so perfumed as to resemble (was there ever such nonsense) congealed odours, or a crystallization of the essence of sweet flowers,” are to be sold, but on inquiry she is told by a “demoiselle behind the counter, as neat as English muslin and French (what a wonder it wasn’t English) tournure could make her,” that ‘we sell no such a ting,’ but that she might have ‘de cracker, be bun, de plom-cake, de spice gingerbread, de mutton and de mince pye, de crompet and de muffin, de gelée of de calves foot, and de apple dumplin.’ Reader, Lady Morgan “was struck dumb!” She purchased a bundle of crackers, “hard enough to crack the teeth of an elephant,” and hurried from the shop. But misfortunes never come single, and her ladyship, though an exception to most other general rules, was not destined to prove the correctness of that one in this instance, for just as she was escaping from the place where she had experienced the serious inconvenience of being “struck dumb,” she was struck in another way—viz. on the left cheek, by the explosion…