LETTER LXXXVII. Rica to * **.

MAN, they say, is a sociable animal. In this respect, the French appear to me to be more men than others: they may be called men by way of excellence; for they seem to be only made for society. But I have observed among them, persons who are not only sociable, but who are themselves an universal society. They multiply themselves in every corner; they people, in an instant, the four quarters of the town: a hundred men of this fort make a greater shew than two thousand citizens. They might repair, in the eyes of a stranger, the devastation made by a plague or famine. It is a question in the schools, whether the same body can be at one instant in several places: these men are

a proof of what the philosophers propose as a doubt. These men are always in haste, as they have upon their hands the important business of asking every body they meet—where they are going—and where they have been. You can never put it out of their heads, but that it is a part of good breeding to visit the public every day, separately, exclusive of the visits they make in general, at places where every body meet; but as this is too short a way, it is reckoned as nothing in the rules of their ceremonial. They injure the doors more with knocking at them, than the winds and storms. If all the porters visiting lists were to be examined, their names would be found every day mangled a thousand ways in Swiss The porters at the noblemens houses in France being generally Swiss. ^†337 scrawls. They pass their lives in attending funerals, compliments of condolence, or in matrimonial congratulations. The King never confers a favour on any of his subjects, that it does not put them to the expence of a carriage to go and wish the party joy. At last they return home, vastly fatigued, to rest themselves, that they may be able the next day to resume their tiresome employment. The other day one of them died of weariness, and this epitaph was put upon his tomb.—Here is a man at rest who never rested before. He walked at five hundred and thirty burials. He made himself merry at the birth of two thousand six hundred and fourscore children. The pensions on which he congratulated his friends, always in different terms, amounted to two millions six hundred thousand livres; the ground he walked in town, to nine thousand six hundred furlongs; his walks in the country to thirty-six. His conversation was pleasing; he had a fund ready made, of three hundred sixty five stories: he possessed besides, from his youth, an hundred and eighteen apothegms collected from the ancients, which he made use of upon extraordinary occasions. He at last died, in the sixtieth year of his age. I hold my tongue, passenger, for when should I finish telling thee every thing that he said, and every thing that he saw?

Paris, the 3d of the moon of the 2d Gemmadi,
1715.