The Champs Élysées is hardly a street, but as a thoroughfare it is the most remarkable in the world. It is a much better show than are the boulevards. The place for which you pay to enter is generally more interesting than the place to which admittance is free, and any one can walk along the boulevards, but to ride in the Champs Élysées you must pay something, even if you take your fiacre by the hour. Some Parisians regret that the Avenue des Champs Élysées should be so cheapened that it is not reserved for carriages hired by the month, and not by the course, and that omnibuses and hired cabs are not kept out of it, as they are kept out of Hyde Park. But should this rule obtain the Avenue des Champs Élysées would lose the most amusing of its features. It would shut out the young married couples and their families and friends in their gala clothes, which look strangely unfamiliar in the sunlight, and make you think that the wearers have been up all night; and the hundreds of girls in pairs from the Jardin de Paris, who have halved the expense of a fiacre, but who cannot yet afford a brougham; and the English tourists dressed in flannel shirts and hunting-caps and knickerbockers, exactly as though they were penetrating the mountains of Afghanistan or the deserts of Syria, and as unashamed of their provincialism as the young marquis who passes on his dog-cart is unashamed of having placed the girl with him on his right hand instead of his left, though by so doing he tells every one who passes who and what she is. It would shut out the omnibuses, with the rows of spectators on their tops, who lean on their knees and look down into the carriages below, and point out the prettiest gowns and faces; and it would exclude the market-wagons laden with huge piles of yellow carrots and purple radishes, with a woman driving on the box-seat, and a dog chained beside her. There is no other place in the world, unless it be Piccadilly at five o'clock in the afternoon, where so many breeds of horses trot side by side, where the chains of the baron banker and the cracking whip of a drunken cabman and the horn of some American millionaire's four-in-hand all sound at the same time. To be known is easy in the boulevards, but it is a distinction in the Avenue des Champs Élysées--a distinction which costs much money and which lasts an hour. Sometimes it is gained by liveries and trappings and a large red rosette in the button-hole, or by driving the same coach at the same hour at the same rate of speed throughout the season, or by wearing a fez, or by sending two sais ahead of your cart to make a way for it, or by a beautiful face and a thoroughbred pug on a cushion at your side, although this last mode is not so easy, as there are many pretty faces and many softly cushioned victorias and innumerable pug-dogs, and when the prevailing color for the hair happens to be red--as it was last summer--the chance of gaining any individuality becomes exceedingly difficult.