… being able to escape, for an hour, from those everlasting evenings which are devoted to the dull vacuity of fashionable conversation, or the ad repetitions of card assemblies, and to store the famished mind with a little stock of thought and … as come to Paris to acquire the French language, would find at the Lycée not only the advantages of instruction, but of conversation; since the gentlemen form a sort of club every evening, when the journals of the day are read, and its … being able to escape, for an hour, from those everlasting evenings which are devoted to the dull vacuity of fashionable conversation, or the ad repetitions of card assemblies, and to store the famished mind with a little stock of thought and …