Indeed, all this quarter is melancholy-looking, silent, quaint, and monastic. Chaplet, scapulary, candle, missal, and pious picture-dealers have their shops in it. The spot is a sort of religious fair; even the streets have liturgical names: Saint-Eleuthère, Saint-Rustique, near the Rue Girardon, and the Calvary cemetery, overlooked by the awkward outlines of the old Galette Windmill, the ordinary rendezvous for idlers, boulevard inquisitives, artists' models, lemans and bullies of the neighbourhood. The ancient Montmartre, with its picturesqueness, is again met with in the Rue Saint-Vincent, in the Rue des Saules containing the "Lively Rabbit" tavern, and in the Rue de la Fontaine-du-But, sordid streets, bordered with sorry habitations whose windows are hung with linen drying, and which seem at each story to harbour a different poverty; strange streets, running for the most part between a crumbling old house and a hoarding mossy with rain and covered with inscriptions. As a matter of fact, these palisades serve as an outlet for the confidences of the "pals" and their "gals" of the quarter. Amorous effusions may be read side by side with threats, and the great ones of the earth are sometimes severely dealt with. The epithet is always a bitter one. It savours of debauch, vice and crime. [Illustration: THE PLACE DE LA CONCORDE IN 1829 _Canella, pinxit_ (Carnavalet Museum)] And yet, in this corner of Paris, which modern embellishments will soon have made unrecognisable, bits of admirable scenery are to be met with, exquisite lanes of verdure, birds, tame pigeons, whistling blackbirds; and one might fancy one's self far away in some peaceful country-place, if, at the end of all these streets, were not seen the huge violet-coloured mass of the Capital, in fairy panorama, an ocean of stone, whence heave, like masts, the bell-towers of palaces, the turrets, belfries and steeples of churches, with domes, roofs and gardens--an incomparable vision of art, grandeur and beauty. The great Balzac informs us that César Birotteau was ruined by speculations he engaged in on the "waste ground round about the Madeleine church." He lost in them the profits realised by his "Eau Carminative" and by the "Double Pâte des Sultanes." His "Rose Queen" perfumery was swallowed up in them.... And, however, César Birotteau was right in his reasoning. To-day, the Madeleine building ground is the highest quoted in Paris. In 1802, the surface was occupied by foundation works and scaffolding, showing the pillars of the church so long since commenced and still in the building. [Illustration: INGENUOUS BENEVOLENCE _Duplessis-Bertaux, inv. et del._]