From the street which in old Paris times used to go by the name of the Rue Royale, and which I know by the token that there is an English pastry-cook’s on the right-hand side, coming down; where in old days I used (a small lad then at the Collège Bourbon) to spend my half-holidays in consuming real English cheesecakes, and thinking of home—in the Rue Royale, now called, I think, Rue de la République; I walked on to the place, and by the Boulevard de la Madeleine, des Italiens, and so by the long line of that magnificent thoroughfare, to within a few streets of the Porte St. Denis. Here I stopped, for the simple reason that a hedge of soldiery bristled ominously across the road, close to the Rue de Faubourg Montmartre, and that the commanding officer would let neither man, woman, nor child pass. The Boulevards were crowded, almost impassable in fact, with persons of every grade, from the “lion” of the Jockey Club, or the English nobleman, to the pretty grisette in her white cap, and the scowling, bearded citizen, clad in blouse and _calotte_, and looking very much as if he knew more of a barricade than he chose to aver. The houses on either side of the way bore frightful traces of the combat of the previous day. The Maison Doré, the Café Anglais, the Opéra Comique, Tortoni’s, the Jockey Club, the Belle Jardinière, the Hôtel des Affaires Etrangères, and scores, I might almost say hundreds of the houses had their windows smashed, or the magnificent sheets of plate-glass starred with balls; the walls pockmarked with bullets: seamed and scarred and blackened with gunpowder. A grocer, close to the Rue de Marivaux, told me that he had not been able to open his door that morning for the dead bodies piled on the step before it. Round all the young trees (the old trees were cut down for former barricades in February and June, 1848), the ground shelves a little in a circle; in these circles there were pools of blood. The people—the extraordinary, inimitable, consistently inconsistent French people—were unconcernedly lounging about, looking at these things with pleased yet languid curiosity. They paddled in the pools of blood; they traced curiously the struggles of some wounded wretch, who, shot or sabred on the curbstone, had painfully, deviously, dragged himself (so the gouts of blood showed) to a door-step—to die. They felt the walls, pitted by musket bullets; they poked their walking-sticks into the holes made by the cannon-balls. It was as good as a play to them.