sunny autumn afternoon, yet I met no soul in this dingy street, which seemed to catch not a ray of the sun's illumination. It is crossed by two sinister little lanes, the Rue Amyot, at the corner of which Cérizet, in "Les Petits Bourgeois," carried on the business of a small usurer in a loathsome, grimy house, and the Rue du Pot de Fer, before coming to which one passes a high, dark barrack, heavy iron bars shielding its dirty lower windows, the "Institution Lhomond pour l'éducation des jeunes filles"--poor _jeunes filles_! When the Rue Tournefort meets the Rue Lhomond there is a very steep descent, accurately described by Balzac, into the Rue de l'Arbalète. Almost any of the mournful dwellings with weedy gardens on this slope might have been the hideous _pension_ where Goriot died, while at the corner of the Rue de l'Arbalète there is a veritable dungeon, only two tiny windows in cracked frames piercing its high, blank wall. If you proceed into the narrow Rue Mouffetard, one long, smelly vegetable market, you will then realize the general state of all but the best of Louis Philippe's Paris. It was part of the old world, unconscious of its impending reformation in the light of the new ideals of comfort and sanitation which were to become the accented notes of modernity. It was a provincial city of small compass with no industrial suburbs, no railways--let alone trams or river steamboats--and a population of considerably less than a million concentrated for the most part in its overcrowded quarters by the river banks, where the excitement of its spiritual life made up for the deficiencies of its material well-being. There were few public buildings of recent construction; the Louvre was still disfigured by the _débris_ of the Place du Carrousel; the Hôtel de Ville, Notre Dame, and the Palais de Justice were hemmed in by crabbed streets and thickly clustering old houses. Private gardens were many, but public squares were few. Except for the boulevards the streets had medieval paving with central gutters, from which all and sundry were liberally splashed, so that for well-dressed persons to venture in them on foot was an impossibility. An American writing in 1835 says of them: "They are paved with cubical stones of eight or ten inches, convex on the upper surface like the shell of a terrapin; few have room for side-walks, and where not bounded by stores they are as dark as they were under King Pepin. Some seem to be watertight."[37] They were seldom swept, never flushed, and primitively lit. The noise, too, except on the boulevards, was deafening and incessant. Not only did the eternal rumbling of wheels over cobblestones and the sharp clatter of stumbling hoofs assail the ear, but also the ringing of bells, the rattle of water-carriers' buckets, the din of barrel-organs and itinerant singers, and all those street cries of fish-sellers, clothes-merchants, rag and bone men, glaziers, umbrella menders, and fruit-vendors so picturesque in isolated