The Palais Royale is an immense building, in the form of a parallelogram, within which is a garden distributed into separate gravelled walks. In the piazzas which run along the sides of the edifice are shops, coffee-houses, bagnios, money-changers, gambling-houses, and stockbrokers. The jewellers’ shops are as numerous and brilliant as if neither misery nor miserable human beings existed. You see nothing but chains, half pearl, half diamond. The woollen drapers unfurl from the top of their shops to the floor every kind of stuff. The stuffs are under your hand, no one watching you; and the master is careless and sorry when you ask him the price. The odour of exquisite ragouts ascends in vapours to the air, the side tables are loaded with fruit, confectionery and pastry, and you may dine to the sound of musical instruments and French horns played by girls who are _not_ nymphs of Diana. Petty gaming-houses support the shops of women who sell garters, lavender water, toothbrushes and sealing-wax. Booksellers’ shops allure the libertine and entrap innocent youth. Pictures from curious collection books, licentious engravings, libidinous novels serve as signs to a crowd of loose women, lodging in the wooden shops. Their nets are ten feet distant from the sauntering youth, idle and already emaciated in the flower of his age. Above the wooden shops are gambling-rooms, where all the passions and torments of hell are assembled. As soon as the day closes all the arcades are suddenly illuminated, the shops become resplendent and the crowd more numerous. This is the moment when the gaming-houses open under the sanction of the Government and afford it a productive revenue. While the great sharpers are employed in the drawing-rooms above, the lesser ones are at work in the through passages, which communicate with the adjacent street and serve as gliding holes to swarms of pickpockets and money jobbers. Your steps under the arcades are arrested by smoke, which pricks your eyes, it is the kitchen flame of the restaurateurs. Close to them are the balls beginning in subterraneous grottoes. Across the air-holes you see circles of girls, leaping, giggling, rushing on their gallants like Bacchantes. In the auction rooms the brokers, dealers, retailers are all seated. Women’s wigs, chimney pendulums, shawls, handkerchiefs, shirts, beds _â la Duchesse_ were sold to the highest bidder. Spies of the police prowl in every coffee house, but no one dares now talk politics in them. Under the arcades are holes of shops, where young girls attract the passengers by their glances. These places are the assiduous rendezvous of every man fattened by rapine, army contractors, agents, administrators of tontines and lotteries, professors of nocturnal robberies, and stock-jobbers.