Think not also that the Boulevards retain their glittering aspect of rich decorated shops, teeming with the luxury of colour and gilding as before. We are in the midst of a financial crisis, and misery and want are increasing daily. Trade has ceased with the want of confidence; ruin has fallen on many; workmen have been dismissed, and shop-boys turned adrift in hundreds upon the streets; and, in spite of the "roasted larks" all ready for hungry mouths, and "showers of gold" which the Government promises as about to fall from the heaven of the republic upon the working classes, it is not only on the faces of the tradespeople at their shop-doors, or behind the mockery of their plate-glass windows, that there is impressed a gloom, but upon the many hundreds and thousands who seek work and cannot find it, and who wander up and down with hanging heads, or while away their weary hours in lounging about the outskirts of the disputing groups. See! how many shops are shut! See! how sadly the placard of "_boutique à louer_," upon the closed doors, meets the eye at every ten steps, and tells a tale of bankruptcy; how many rows of dismal shutters, like coffin-lids erect upon their ends, give by day to the streets that funereal look they formerly only gave by night; and chalked upon these shutters are still the words--"_armes donnés au peuple_," a still remaining _souvenir_ of the days of tumult, disorder, and bloodshed, when every house in Paris was scrawled over by the same announcement, in order to prevent the forcible entry of the mob into private dwellings to carry off defensive weapons. If we step aside into one of those monster-shops, with their vast corridors, and avenues, and galleries, and staircases, which lately were so crowded that it was difficult for customers to be served even by the hundred _commis_ within, what a scene of desert listlessness meets our eyes! There is scarce a solitary customer who wanders amongst their long galleries, vainly draperied and beshawled with all the rich wonders of modern manufacture. The weary-looking shop-boys, the few that remain, run out of breath from one end of a long gallery to another to get what you want, for they have now several departments of the establishment under their care. There is not a trace here of Paris as it was.