The calumniated _Assistance Publique_ has built a large _maternité_, where mothers and infants receive all possible care; and, in case of pressure on their space, they pay midwives, properly diplomaed, to take charge of poor women in their own houses. Everything at present is so comfortably organised in these public institutions that many women of small means prefer to avail themselves of them rather than endure the domestic upheaval of a confinement at home. It should, however, be admitted that the _Assistance Publique_ took the idea from M. Pinard’s charmingly situated _maternité_ of the Boulevard Port Royal. M. Pinard is something more than a celebrated _accoucheur_; he is a philanthropist, or, as his enthusiastic disciple, Dr. Franck Brentano, said of him when kindly doing me the honours of the _maternité_ of the Boulevard Port Royal, he is a saint. He decided that his hospital should be cheerfully situated, and so it lies in lovely gardens, and, on every side, the patients have views of flowers and trees and green spaces between well-kept paths. Not a hospital this, surely, but an elegant old mansion, through whose long, open windows the fragrance and bloom of flowers carry joy to the senses, while the song of birds makes perpetual music for the weary convalescents. Dr. Franck Brentano showed me the trim rose-beds with the proud intimation that it was M. Pinard who reared them exclusively for his invalids. From time to time he gathers them, and places a rose, moist with its early dew, beside a patient, bringing her, with such delicacy, the assurance that she is, for him, something more than a public patient. Not so were cherished unfortunate women under the _ancien régime_. We laugh at the official legend bequeathed France by the Revolution, and, of a surety, we are not justified in that laughter. If liberty, equality, and fraternity are not all that they might be in France to-day, there has been made a considerable step towards their accomplishment which the conscientious observer is forced to recognise. If brotherhood is still in a nebulous state, the same cannot be said of equality. Where, in London, will you find the head of a large hospital cultivating roses and gathering them at sunrise to carry a breath of delight to a worn-out woman of the people? Such a division and infrangible distance as exist between classes in England are here no longer known. The people are the better for it, and certainly society is not the worse. If republican independence has done nothing else for France, it deserves national gratitude for having abolished what flourishes so desperately in England,—the painful whine of poverty, not ashamed to cringe, and the smirking curtsey and bob of the people, proud to acknowledge what they are pleased to call their betters.