enjoy the Parisian flavour like the bouquet of some delicate wine. To all Paris is a marvel; to them it is a living creature; every man, every fragment of a house, is 'part of the cellular tissue of this great courtesan, whose head, heart, and fantastic manners are thoroughly known to them.' They are lovers of Paris; to them it is a costly luxury to travel in Paris. They are incessantly arrested before the dramas, the disasters, the picturesque accidents, which assail one in the midst of this moving queen of cities. They start in the morning to go to its extremities, and find themselves still unable to leave its centre at dinner-time. It is a marvellous spectacle at all times; but, he exclaims, 'O Paris! qui n'a pas admire tes sombres paysages, tes echappees de lumiere, tes culs-de-sac profonds et silencieux; qui n'a pas entendu tes murmures entre minuit et deux heures du matin, ne connait encore rien de ta vraie poesie, ni de tes bizarres et larges contrastes.' In the scenes which follow, we are introduced to a lover watching the beautiful and virtuous object of his adoration as she descends an infamous street late in the evening, and enters one of the houses through a damp, moist, and fetid passage, feebly lighted by a trembling lamp, beneath which are seen the hideous face and skinny fingers of an old woman, as fitly placed as the witches in the blasted heath in 'Macbeth.' In this case, however, Balzac is in one of his wildest moods, and the hideous mysteries of a huge capital become the pretext for a piece of rather ludicrous melodrama. Paris is full enough of tragedies without the preposterous beggar Ferragus, who appears at balls as a distinguished diplomat, and manages to place on a young gentleman's head of hair a slow poison (invented for the purpose), which brings him to an early grave. More impressive, because less extravagant, is that Maison Vauquer, every hole and corner of which is familiar to the real student of Balzac. It is situated, as everybody should know, in the Rue Neuve St.-Genevieve, just where it descends so steeply towards the Rue de l'Arbalete that horses have some trouble in climbing it. We know its squalid exterior, its creaking bell, the wall painted to represent an arcade in green marble, the crumbling statue of Cupid, with the half-effaced inscription-- 'Qui que tu sois, voici ton maitre,-- Il l'est, le fut, ou le doit etre.'