Before closing my preface to this Selection from the sketches, essays and criticisms of Paris life, under its picturesque, popular, literary and social aspects that represents John F. Macdonald’s interpretation of the spirit of the “Amazing City,” between 1907 and 1914, I have to acknowledge the kindness of the several Editors, to whom these different articles were originally addressed; and who have allowed me to reprint them in the present volume. _The Roué_, _In a Cellar_, and _The Affair of the Collars_, appeared originally in _The Morning Post_. The three articles, _On Strike_, the two pictures of the historical _Pension de Famille in the Rue des Poitevins_ (haunted by the memory of Gambetta), and of the other _Pension de Famille in the Shadow of St Sulpice_, saddened by the memory of the pathetic story of the gentle and pious old maids who died broken-hearted, as victims of the Rochette swindle, appeared in _The Morning Leader_, in the days before its association with _The Daily News_. The series of short sketches of French Presidents and Leading Statesmen, and Personalities, who have helped to make, and are still living influences in, French politics, were contributed, later, to _The Daily News and Morning Leader_. I have to thank the Editor of _The Contemporary Review_ for consenting to the reprinting of the articles upon _Henri Rochefort_ and _Royal Visits to Paris_; and the Editor of _The Fortnightly Review_ for allowing me to reproduce from the series of articles on _French Life and the French Stage_, which appeared in this _Review_ during several years, three special criticisms, illustrative of the typical French national “virtue,”—a fundamental understanding of the essential duty of man to be an intelligent and kindly human being—applied to the correction and sweetening of faulty rules of “Bohemian” morality and bourgeois respectability; and lending high ideals to what is generally described as the “realistic” spirit of the modern French drama. The articles descriptive of life in the Latin Quarter appeared originally in _The Saturday Review_. FREDERIKA MACDONALD. _February 1918._ I IN THE STREET In my almost daily perambulations through the brilliant, through the drab, and through the ambiguous quarters of Paris, I constantly come upon street scenes that bring me inquisitively to a standstill. Not that they are particularly novel or startling. Indeed, to the Parisian they are such banal, everyday spectacles that he passes them by without so much as a glance. But for me, familiar though I am with the physiognomy of the Amazing City, these street scenes, amusing or pathetic, sentimental or grim, possess an indefinable, a never-failing charm.