I strolled on until I entered a narrow passage, penetrating a long line of buildings. It was thronged with people, and passing in with the rest, I found myself unexpectedly in a scene that equally surprised and delighted me. It was a spacious square enclosed by one entire building. The area was laid out as a garden, planted with long avenues of trees and beds of flowers, and in the centre a fountain was playing in the shape of a _fleur-de-lis_, with a jet about forty feet in height. A superb colonnade ran round the whole square, making a covered gallery of the lower story, which was occupied by shops of the most splendid appearance, and thronged through its long sheltered _pavès_ by thousands of gay promenaders. It was the far-famed _Palais Royal_. I remembered the description I had heard of its gambling houses, and facilities for every vice, and looked with a new surprise on its Aladdin-like magnificence. The hundreds of beautiful pillars, stretching away from the eye in long and distant perspective, the crowd of citizens, and women, and officers in full uniform, passing and re-passing with French liveliness and politeness, the long windows of plated glass glittering with jewellery, and bright with everything to tempt the fancy, the tall sentinels pacing between the columns, and the fountain turning over its clear waters with a fall audible above the tread and voices of the thousands who walked around it--who could look upon such a scene and believe it what it is, the most corrupt spot, probably, on the face of the civilized world? LETTER V. THE LOUVRE--AMERICANS IN PARIS--POLITICS, ETC. The salient object in my idea of Paris has always been the Louvre. I have spent some hours in its vast gallery to-day and I am sure it will retain the same prominence in my recollections. The whole palace is one of the oldest, and said to be one of the finest, in Europe; and, if I may judge from its impressiveness, the vast inner court (the _façades_ of which were restored to their original simplicity by Napoleon), is a specimen of high architectural perfection. One could hardly pass through it without being better fitted to see the masterpieces of art within; and it requires this, and all the expansiveness of which the mind is capable besides, to walk through the _Musée Royale_ without the painful sense of a magnificence beyond the grasp of the faculties.