Paris is bad enough, Heaven knows; but that it is the wickedest city on the globe, as is frequently asserted, must be taken with large grains of allowance. The wickedest of cities are numerous. Not only has Paris that reputation, but Vienna, Naples, St. Petersburg, Berlin, London, New York, have it also. Even Boston, the centre of the land of steady habits and high moral ideas, is pronounced by many persons, who know it intimately, as unequalled for private profligacy. Stockholm, in the far and frozen north, where the temperature might be fancied to freeze the evil passions before they could have full play, has often been declared more immoral than Paris, Naples, Vienna, or London. In proportion to the population, there are more illegitimate children born in Stockholm, it is said, than in any other capital of Europe; and as marriage is held to be the best and purest condition of men and women, this extraordinary extent of illegitimacy must be interpreted to the Swedish city’s discredit. It is all folly to arraign any particular community as worse than another. Communities are like the individuals who make them up. This has certain defects which that has not. Circumstances and conditions produce different results in different places; but, on the whole, mankind, when thoroughly understood, will be found very similar in most of the centres of civilization. As Paris is acknowledged to be the capital of gayety and pleasure, and as morals are left there to take their natural course rather than to be hampered without benefit, Paris is the best place to observe human nature in its disapproved relations. The demi-monde is opposed to the grand-monde, and ought to represent, therefore, not only women of a peculiar class, but the members of both sexes whom society, as the expression of conventionality, refuses to acknowledge. The demi-monde, in this sense, means the under-world, nowhere so interesting a study as on the Seine. [Sidenote: CHARACTER OF THE UNDER-WORLD.] Outwardly, the French capital is most decorous. Vice shows like virtue because it is relieved of grossness; even more, is softened and rounded with grace. You do not see there, as in London or New York, repulsive and revolting scenes. You do not encounter drunken and disgusting men: you do not hear women, who have unsexed themselves, indulging in ribaldry and profanity in the public thoroughfares, or anywhere else in fact. Everybody and everything appears so proper that inexperienced and innocent souls have expressed their astonishment at the ill fame the city has acquired, and have concluded that its bad name is undeserved. Promenading on the Boulevards or riding on the Champs Elysées, they are unable to distinguish the Faubourg St. Germain from the Quartier Latin—the upper-world from the under-world. [Illustration: GRAND AVENUE OF THE CHAMPS ELYSEES, PARIS.]