artist, worth in reality about 4l., cost 30l.; an evening dress, tawdry with flounces, ribbons, and bad lace could not be had under 70. There are about thirty shops in Paris where, as at this man-milliner's, the goods are not better than elsewhere, but where they cost about ten times their value. They are patronised by fools with more money than wits, and chiefly by foreign fools. The proprietor of one of these establishments was complaining to me the other day of what he was losing by the siege; I told him that I sympathised with him about as much as I should with a Greek brigand, bewailing a falling off of wealthy strangers in the district where he was in the habit of carrying on his commercial operations. Whenever the communications are again open to Paris, and English return to it, I would give them this piece of advice--never deal where _ici on parle Anglais_ is written up; it means _ici on vole les Anglais_. The only tradesmen in Paris who are making a good thing out of their country's misfortunes are the liquor sellers and the grocers; their stores seem inexhaustible, but they are sold at famine prices. "I who speak to you, I owe myself to my country. There is no sacrifice I would not make rather than capitulate to those Huns, those Vandals," said a grocer to me, with a most sand-the-sugar face, this morning, as he pocketed about ten times the value of a trifle--candles, in fact, which have risen twenty-five per cent. in the last two days--and folding his arms, scowled from under his kepi into futurity, with stern but vacuous resolution. _January 6th._