The tobacco-factory of Paris, where so much of the native as well as foreign tobacco-leaf is prepared, consists of large buildings, five storeys high, situated between the Quai d’Orsay, the Rue de l’Université, the Rue Saint-Jean, and the Rue de la Boucherie des Invalides. The large gate in the Rue Saint-Jean affords entrance to tobaccos coming from all parts of the globe, of which the qualities have been ascertained beforehand by experts buying on samples which are preserved for comparison with each consignment as it arrives. The great national factory receives from the United States--Virginia, for instance, Kentucky, and Maryland--large shipments of tobacco packed in casks; from South America vast quantities in bales composed of skins. Java, too, and Manilla in the Pacific Ocean, Macedonia, Egypt, Greece, Algeria, Hungary, Holland, and finally France itself, contribute their share. The anti-smokers of France naturally look with horror on the huge tobacco factory of their metropolis; and more than a century ago Valmont Bomare wrote the following lament: “I wish I had never known that in 1750 they estimated that Maryland and Virginia consigned each year more than a hundred million casks of tobacco to the English, who only consumed about half of it, exporting the rest to France, and thereby enriching themselves annually to the amount of nine million two hundred thousand francs.” At present nineteen departments of France produce some fifty million pounds of tobacco, worth twenty million francs. The native tobacco growths are restricted by the often beneficial interference of the administration, which has to be consulted by growers in choosing the land for cultivation, and which even prescribes the varieties of tobacco to be grown. [Illustration: LLAMA IN THE JARDIN DES PLANTES.] The sale of tobacco is a monopoly in France, the shop-keeping tobacconists being really nothing more than Government agents for the distribution of cigars, cigarettes, tobacco, and snuff. The tenancy of a tobacconist’s shop is a privilege conferred by the Government sometimes on widows and orphans whose husbands or fathers have deserved well of the state, sometimes on less meritorious persons who have rendered services at elections, or have in some other way earned the goodwill of the Government or of Government agents. All tobacco manufactories are Government property; and it was as such that the tobacco manufactory of Dieppe was seized in 1870 by the Prussians when they occupied that town. They declared their intention of burning it--but only as a menace; and they obligingly allowed it to be ransomed on payment of 75,000 francs. CHAPTER XXII. SOME HISTORICAL BUILDINGS. Abailard and Héloise--Fulbert’s House in the Rue des Chantres--The Philip Augustus Towers--The Hôtel Barbette--The Hôtel de Sens. [Illustration: RUE DES CHANTRES, LOOKING TOWARDS NOTRE DAME.]