The fashionable boulevards have already appeared in a previous chapter, but a word must be said of the difference between the then and now of that brilliant corner of Paris which most Europeans and Americans see once before they die. To-day, without a doubt, the Boulevard des Capucines, which stretches from the Madeleine to the Opéra, has the most distinguished and luxurious appearance. The Boulevard des Italiens beyond the Opéra is dowdier and more workaday. In the days of Bohemia the Boulevard des Capucines had no social existence. It had as yet not been levelled with the Rue Basse du Rempart, which, some fifteen feet below it, followed the course of the ancient moat; it was flanked by plots of land on which new houses were being erected, and its only traffic was the omnibus which jogged between the Madeleine and the Bastille. The present Opera-house and Place de l'Opéra were not existent, for the Opéra stood just off the Boulevard des Italiens, beyond Tortoni's, while the Rue de la Paix came quietly into the boulevard at a sharp angle, instead of arriving in that busy open space, with Cook's office as its centre, over which traffic plies in all directions with bewildering activity. The Avenue de l'Opéra, also, was not known to Bohemia. At that day a pedestrian who wished to go direct from the top of the Rue de la Paix to the Louvre had to thread a maze of narrow streets--an example of which remains in the Rue des Petits Champs--which became meaner and more sinister as he neared the Louvre. The Louvre quarter, so close to brilliance and luxury, was a squalid plague-spot, that has since been thoroughly cleansed. The brotherhood of the Impasse du Doyenné, I suspect, were careful to have a companion when they ascended the Rue Froidmanteau or the Rue Traversière after dark. If one crosses the Avenue de l'Opéra between the entrance of the Rue de l'Echelle on one side and the Rue Molière on the other, one will have exactly traversed the site of the infamous Rue de Langlade where in "Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes" Vautrin found Esther la Torpille on the verge of death, _à propos_ of which Balzac has a lurid passage on the thick shadows, the flickering lights, the phantom forms, and disquieting sounds which characterized at nightfall this _lacis de petites rues_. [Illustration: The Rue St. Denis]