We of the Hill of Martyrs, it is we who know what is life. Stand at your doors in our steep streets, climb you up yonder to the top of the hill, up with you to the topmost scaffolding of the preposterous cathedral of the Sacred Heart that is a-building, topped with cupolas that shall stand like giant onions to acclaim the sins of garlic-eating burgess France, and look down--condescend to Paris. Between us and the river, with Latin Quarter beyond, glitter the lights of a different Paris, another world--a Paris that knows as little of us of the hill as of the professors of the Latin Quarter yonder--a Paris of the boulevards, a Paris of the aristocrat and of the burgess--a world that knows little of poetry or of learning, and tries to forget what it knows; a world that despises us as we despise it; that shuns us as we shun it. There the burgess, with sole ambition the desire to best his neighbour, plods in glum respectability his mean inglorious day, yet once in a blue moon struts his holiday, his limbs cramped with lack of use to live, his only law of life a fear of his neighbour’s opinion, his object in life to put a number of coins in a bank, to grow full-bodied in the doing, and marry a wife and reproduce his ignoble species. His furthest ambition to grow very old. God! what a life! Yet is his end like ours who live one long holiday--to die and rot like any lousy beggar, or prince, or cardinal. For the avoidance of this his bank cannot serve--he can write no letter of credit that shall avail him beyond his length of earth.” “Ay, André--they exist; they do not live,” cried a young fellow of pallid countenance, whose hand, thin, and white, and delicate as a woman’s, shook as he raised his glass of absinthe to his lips. André Joyeux laughed in his stride: