In the America of the 1850's, France, and particularly Paris, were thought to be places possessing singularly malevolent influences over young men. The following item from the Boston Traveller (1857) is a good example of this belief:
La Belle Paris! the synonym of all that is beautiful; the city of gayety and revelry, of music and mirth, where pleasure lures, dazzles, intoxicates, and then destroys! is this the sad end to which your young men of culture and intellect arrive, in a short quarter of a century? Then let it be a loud warning to the youth of our own time and nation, that a better path is marked out for them in the Book of all books, which counsels to be temperate in all things, to take hold of wisdom whose ways are ways to pleasantness-whose paths are peace.1