the flame that burnt at her heart, in most respects a provincial city. Only in such a city could Bohemia perfectly have realized itself; an industrial metropolis would have swallowed it or brushed it contemptuously aside. Paris, then, compared with herself of to-day, would have been almost unrecognizable. There was no sign of the rich and luxurious quarter which has grown up round the Champs Elysées, with its magnificent hotels and fine mansions. The Champs Elysées were used during the daytime for riding or driving, but there was hardly a house to be seen except two or three wretched _cafés_. After sunset it was madness to go past the _rond-point_, for beyond was the home of thieves and cut-throats, the Bois de Boulogne, needless to say, being in a much more wild state than to-day. The Parc Monceau was practically in the country, and even the Quartier du Roule, by the top of the Boulevard Malesherbes, was all market-gardens when Rosa Bonheur lived there as a child. As for the Batignolles, that Kensington of modern Paris, its repute was as unsavoury as that of the London fields now respectably covered by Sloane Square and Sloane Street. The quarter chosen by wealth, as opposed to blue blood, which lived in dreary _hôtels_ surrounded by high walls in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, lay in the neighbourhood of the present Saint-Lazare terminus. The favourite street was the Rue de la Pépinière, continued by the Rue Saint-Lazare. Only a small part of the Rue de la Pépinière is now left, most of it being called the Rue La Boëtie, but it retains its old name between the Boulevard Malesherbes and the Rue Saint-Lazare. Another fashionable street was the Rue de Provence, which runs parallel to the south of the Rue Saint-Lazare. In the former was the famous house inhabited successively by seven of Balzac's courtesans,[36] in the latter the charming house of Baron Nucingen. Every Englishman knows the clamour and smell and garish shops of the Rue Saint-Lazare to-day, and the Rue de Provence is just a plain _bourgeois_ thoroughfare of shops, _cafés_, flats, and a post-office.