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Paris
December 3, 1885
My dear Minna
How unnecessary of you to begin a correspondence between us with a formal introduction! Does my answering you require anything more than your writing to me? I would have answered before had I not been waiting for the opportunity to pick up the gauntlet thrown to me so gracefully, but Herr Otto Wolff1 (or Wolf-fff) still hesitates to honor Paris with his presence or has settled elsewhere than in the Rue d'Hauteville.
I am under the full impact of Paris and, waxing very poetical, could compare it to a vast overdressed Sphinx who gobbles up every foreigner unable to solve her riddles. But I will save all this for verbal effusions. Suffice it to say that the city and its inhabitants strike me as uncanny; the people seem to me of a different species from ourselves; I feel they are all possessed of a thousand demons; instead of “Monsieur” and “Voilà l'Écho de Paris” I hear them yelling “À la lanterne” and “À bas” this man and that. I don't think they know the meaning of shame or fear; the women no less than the men crowd round nudities as much as they do round corpses in the Morgue or the ghastly posters in the streets announcing a