The power formerly intrusted to the sentinel, wherever there was one stationed, of refusing the _entrée_ to all persons not properly dressed, gave occasion once to a saucy outbreaking of French wit in one of the National Guard, which was amusing enough. This civic guardian was stationed at the gates of a certain _Mairie_ on some public occasion, with the usual injunction not to permit any person "_mal-mise_" to enter. An _incroyable_ presented himself, not dressed in the fashion, but immoderately beyond it. The sentinel looked at him, and lowered his piece across the entrance, pronouncing in a voice of authority-- "You cannot enter." "Not enter?" exclaimed the astonished beau, looking down at the exquisite result of his laborious toilet; "not enter?--forbid me to enter, sir?--impossible! What is it you mean? Let me pass, I say!" The imperturbable sentinel stood like a rock before the entrance: "My orders are precise," he said, "and I may not infringe them." "Precise? Your orders precise to refuse me?" "Oui, monsieur, précis, de refuser qui que ce soit que je trouve mal-mis." LETTER XV. Street Police.--Cleaning Beds.--Tinning Kettles.--Building Houses.--Loading Carts.--Preparing for the Scavenger.--Want of Drains.--Bad Pavement.--Darkness. My last letter was of the Tuileries Gardens; a theme which furnished me so many subjects of admiration, that I think, if only for the sake of variety, I will let the smelfungus vein prevail to-day. Such, then, being my humour,--or my ill-humour, if you will,--I shall indulge it by telling you what I think of the street-police of Paris. I will not tell you that it is bad, for that, I doubt not, many others may have done before me; but I will tell you that I consider it as something wonderful, mysterious, incomprehensible, and perfectly astonishing. In a city where everything intended to meet the eye is converted into graceful ornament; where the shops and coffee-houses have the air of fairy palaces, and the markets show fountains wherein the daintiest naïads might delight to bathe;--in such a city as this, where the women look too delicate to belong wholly to earth, and the men too watchful and observant to suffer the winds of heaven to visit them too roughly;--in such a city as this, you are shocked and disgusted at every step you take, or at every gyration that the wheels of your chariot can make, by sights and smells that may not be described. Every day brings my astonishment on this subject to a higher pitch than the one which preceded it; for every day brings with it fresh conviction that a very considerable portion of the enjoyment of life is altogether destroyed in Paris by the neglect or omission of such a degree of municipal interference as might secure the most elegant people in the world from the loathsome disgust occasioned by the perpetual outrage of common decency in their streets.