chaque homme, chaque fraction de maison est un lobe du tissu cellulaire de cette grande courtisane de laquelle ils connaissent parfaitement la tête, le cœur et les mœurs fantasques. Aussi ceux-là sont les amants de Paris...." There are a happy few to whom it would be enough to say that the Paris of Bohemia was the Paris of Balzac--such devotees, I mean, as have thought it worth while to pay attention to that accurate topography in which Balzac took so great a pride, following it in a contemporary map so that, in their walks about the modern city, streets and houses incessantly recall his characters and his scenes. But life is short for such agreeable exercises, so this chapter must inadequately proceed. I have already touched on the social implications of Louis Philippe's Paris, its smallness and its diminutive population, and my present aim is simply to present more fully its external aspect, which changed so quickly after 1848. The rapidity of the change may well be judged by a passage in Théophile Gautier's article[34] on Paul de Kock, published in 1870. No apology is necessary for transcribing it: "Those [he says] who were born after the Revolution of February 24, 1848, or a little before, cannot imagine what the Paris was like in which the heroes and heroines of Paul de Kock move; it resembled Paris of to-day so little that I sometimes ask myself, on seeing these broad streets, these great boulevards, these vast squares, these interminable lines of monumental houses, these splendid quarters which have replaced the market-gardens, if it is really the city in which I passed my childhood. Paris, which is on the way to become the metropolis of the world, was then only the capital of France. One met French people, even Parisians, in its streets. No doubt foreigners came there, as always, to find pleasure and instruction; but the means of transport were difficult, the ideal of rapidity did not rise above the classic mail-coach, and the locomotive, even in the form of a chimera, was not yet taking shape in the mists of the future. The physiognomy of the population had not therefore sensibly changed.