ON THE DAY FOLLOWING I was invited to a musical soiree at the home of Mr. Walsh, a very distinguished Philadelphian. They sang well enough, which is to say that neither American men nor women figured in the concert, and all the entertainment was provided by an Italian and some Frenchwomen. The Americans, who are by nature as cold as ice, were throughout tempted to regard the Italian amateur as a lunatic, because he, while singing, gesticulated a great deal and assumed dramatic attitudes. The concert ended in some waltzes and quadrilles.

At its conclusion I was introduced to the redoubtable Mrs. Dougdale, who could not have been further from the emaciated figure I had imagined. She said she was perfectly convinced that the Negroes were of the same race as us, just as a black cow is of the same race as a white one. The Negro children show as much intelligence as the white ones; often they learn faster. I asked her if the blacks had citizens' rights. She answered, "Yes, in this state, in law, but they cannot present themselves at the poll."

"Why so?"

"They would be ill-treated."

"And what happens to the rule of law in that case?"

"The law with us is nothing if it is not supported by public opinion."

So, again-the majority.

There was not a drop of wine at the soiree, a lack I remarked on to my countryman as we walked through the streets of his occasionally handsome city. M. Duponceau said that the Quakers will touch nothing, but those of the other party are even worse, as they tipple, for the most part, on sweet Canary wine. Sometimes a port or Madeira is offered, although much of that is watered by the boatmen who see it as their right to sample the wares they transport. As there is some ancient enmity by the majority for the better classes, this "tax" is accepted by those who must pay. Old Duponceau, speaking in an eccentric mixture of French and English, confessed himself the loneliest man in Philadelphia, for although he had a cellar of first-rate wines from Medoc, Graves, and Bourgogne, none of his fellows would even feign to enjoy what he offered them.

I thought perhaps he had no palate, for what decent wine would survive the journey here? I asked what his guests refused.

"De la Fite. "

"Dear Duponceau." I bowed to him. "I would be honored to be your friend." At which the frock-coated Larrit seconded my vote-a sommelier, no doubt-and all three of us, quite suddenly, in spite of our very separate circumstance of wealth and education, were united by this fondness for Patrie and Terroir and fairly galloped along the streets of Philadelphia, a charming city, very favorable to those who have no carriage, since all the streets are bordered with wide sidewalks, and its sole defect is to be monotonous in its beauty.

All the edifices are neat, kept up with extreme care, and have all the freshness of new buildings, and M. Duponceau's house, when we reached it, presented its face to the street with a very Quakerish humility. The entire edifice was the work of saws and hammers.

There were two floors, no evidence of an attic, eight windows to face the unchristened street, and a door placed in the center as if a child had drawn it there.

And so I entered, imagining I knew the character and standing of our host.

The hallway was as you would expect, not even a rug to hide its timbers. The walls were gray, the ceiling white, as in a nunnery. Only at its most distant extreme, almost beyond the penumbra of our host's lantern, was there a door to break the monotony of our passage. I followed him into a dark room redolent of some as yet unidentifiable luxury. Here I watched in blank astonishment as my exiled countryman, a little bent, moved from lamp to lamp and, with every lighted wick, revealed more and more of a library which, I now realized, occupied almost one half of the ground floor of this considerable house. Of its two longest walls only one was broken, and here by the single door through which we had entered. On these walls the source of the luxurious aroma was clearly visible-books, more books. At first I thought the smell buff-colored, but it would not be that simple. And oh, the wonderful variety of those smells. Old copies redolent of the ancien regime, the glossier volumes of laboratories and gases, the American editions with floral perfumes, wig powder, candle wax, and all of them radiating glue and calf leather like tuberose on a summer's evening. I noticed a bright red cloth binding with the name of Diderot, but for the most part the spines were tan and beige and umber, each one holding the golden name of a philosopher or poet (and there was the great Lavoisier, beheaded in the Revolution) familiar since my birth, and if the entire effect was contradicted by a ladder that had clearly begun its life in the unlettered company of a house painter, then could there be a better counterargument for a democracy where greed might tear the land apart but still the low could climb so high?

In the center of the room, well curtained from the scrupulously moral street, was a green baize table and around it were placed, as if for the use of studious friends, four well-cushioned chairs. Our host pushed three of these into an untidy group, and here Larrit and I were instructed to sit and await the pleasures of Medoc. While Duponceau descended the stairs I imagined his cellar, like a deep reflection in a pond, a secret mirror of the library with dusty bottles in the place of fragrant books. Having learned that M. Duponceau had begun his life as a poor draper's son who had learned his English from the soldiers stationed in Saint-Martin-de-Re, I was given one of those dazzling visions of America, sufficient to make one abandon one's necessary fears. I sat with my hands in my lap, contemplating the paint-splattered ladder with the kind of ardor more suited to a study of the lives of saints.

On the high baize table there were two books, positioned in such a way that I could easily read their spines, and it appeared to me that this placement was not accidental. These volumes, at about the level of my eye, had been provided like a book of poetry beside a visitor's bed. The first appeared to be one of those folio editions, so beloved by my mother, of antipodean botany, but it was the second I understood to have been chosen with my interests in mind. Oeuvres de Moliere avec des remarques grammaticales, des avertissements et des observations sur chaque piece, par M. Bret. I took it to my lap. It had its own smells of goatskin and glue-one could imagine the artisans who made it, almost certainly in the service of a noble family-and it was very clear to me, leafing through the heavy paper, that they, who never read a book, had known themselves in the service of the eternal.

"Ah-hah," our host cried from the door. He had two bottles in his left hand and a third in the right and with this latter treasure the dear bright-eyed madman pointed.

I thought, Do not shake the bottle, sir.

"There." He pointed. "There." He shook. "You have your Tartuffe, sir."

Swiftly I returned M. Moliere to his proper place while Duponceau, drawing corks, decanting, pouring with a splash that had the wine foaming like a bath-not elegant but doubtless efficient in achieving what he later called "a damn good airing"-provided me an account of the volume's publication. I listened with some discomfort, thinking there are wine bores and book bores. I much preferred the former. As to the Tartuffe, what a great fool I would appear if I presented myself at Wethersfield with this monster edition in my pocket.

"So," said Duponceau, who had finally come to the end of his educational address. "So here is to the great Moliere."

"To Moliere." I drank.

"To Moliere," said Larrit, and, standing awkwardly, asked if he also might be permitted to examine the book. In speaking he assumed, in imitation of our host, a light and delicate if misshapen form of French, and I was given cause to wonder how the lines of Tartuffe might sound in the chamber of his parrot's mind. This was but a moment's speculation, and I was not sorry that a book would remove him from the conversation. Democracy brings with it tensions and anxieties I could never have predicted, so many of them, and more varieties than all the butterflies in the Bottom Hundred.