] and all the produce of a French
kitchen.
It is not, as you may imagine, the Bourgeois, and less distinguished
prisoners only, who indulge in these highly-seasoned repasts, at the
expence of inhaling the savoury atmosphere they leave behind them: the
beaux and petites mistresses, among the ci-devant, have not less exigent
appetites, nor more delicate nerves; and the ragout is produced at night,
in spite of the odours and disorder that remain till the morrow.
I conclude, notwithstanding your English prejudices, that there is
nothing unwholesome in filth, for if it were otherwise, I cannot account
for our being alive. Five hundred bodies, in a state of coacervation,
without even a preference for cleanliness, "think of that Master Brook."
All the forenoon the court is a receptacle for cabbage leaves, fish
scales, leeks, &c. &c.--and as a French chambermaid usually prefers the
direct road to circumambulation, the refuse of the kitchen is then washed
away by plentiful inundations from the dressing-room--the passages are
blockaded by foul plates, fragments, and bones; to which if you add the
smell exhaling from hoarded apples and gruyere cheese, you may form some
notion of the sufferings of those whose olfactory nerves are not robust.
Yet this is not all--nearly every female in the house, except myself, is
accompanied even here by her lap-dog, who sleeps in her room, and, not
unfrequently, on her bed; and these Lesbias and Lindamiras increase the
insalubrity of the air, and colonize one's stockings by sending forth
daily emigrations of fleas.
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