I must…acknowledge that literature, which formerly held the first degree in the scale of the moral riches of this nation, is likely to decline in priority and influence. The sciences have claimed and obtained in the public mind a superiority resulting from the very nature of their object, I mean utility. The title of savant is not more brilliant than formerly, but it is more imposing; it leads to consequence, to superior employments and.…to riches.

Only imagine, however, a city like Paris, where the cleverest heads of a great kingdom are grouped together in one spot, and in daily association and strife incite and stimulate each other to mutual emulation; where all that is of most value in the kingdoms of nature and art, from every part of the world, is open to inspection; and all this in a city where every bridge and square is associated with some great event of the past, and where every street-corner has a page of history to unfold. And, in addition to all this, not the Paris of a dull and stupid age, but the Paris of the nineteenth century, where for three generations such men as Molière, Voltaire and Diderot have kept up a mass of intellectual power such as can never be met with a second time in any single spot in the whole world.