‘Gabrielle, I have known you from a little girl. I am going to Paris. Like you, I _must_ go. I am fixed with a desire to see the working out of this great problem, the States-General. Gabrielle! the French people are like your Madame Berthier, chained and in prison. I do not know whether my feeble voice will avail to effect their release. You do not know whether yours will liberate one individual out of that great suffering family. Well! we go in hope, vague may be, but earnest, and resolved to do our best. We shall go together.’ ‘What do you say, monsieur?’ ‘I will go and visit my sister, Madame Deschwanden, and shall take you with me. We shall see what takes place.’ ‘You will help me to get to Paris?’ ‘Yes, I will.’ Miaw! The yellow cat, which had been asleep in a corner, was now wide awake, and at a bound had reached Gabrielle’s shoulder. How merrily in Gabrielle’s ear sounded the bells of S. Cross! CHAPTER XVIII. Old Paris is no more. Every day some feature of the ancient capital disappears. This is a commonplace remark. Everyone says it; but few realize how true it is. We, who revisit that queen of cities after an interval of--say, ten years, see mighty changes. Streets are open where were houses once; markets have altered their sites; squares occupy the place where we remember piles of decaying houses; churches appear, where we did not know that they stood, so buried were they in high, many-storied houses. We can breathe in Paris now. Down the boulevards the breeze can now rustle and sweep away the stale odours which once hung all the year round ancient Paris. But we have no conception of what that capital was in 1789. Paris had grown without system. None had drawn out a plan of what it was to be, where the streets were to run, and where squares were to open. The thoroughfares had come by chance, without order, without law, almost without object; the streets twisted and wound their way between walls black with smoke, and overhanging; the houses, with their feet in mud and garbage, and their heads in smoke, stood sideways to the road, as though they turned away to avoid a disagreeable sight and odour. Their narrow front to the street was topped with a high-pitched gable, unless some modern architect had squared it off. Here and there were cemeteries adjoining markets, a refuse heap on which lay dead animals in putrefaction, nooks, where beggars crouched in rags, blind alleys in which squalid children played, open sewers, and public cesspools.