[Illustration: Les Champs Elysées] The glory of Bohemia rests partly on this fact. During Louis Philippe's reign this state of society, comparable in some respects with the ideal polity of the Attic philosophers, was, it is true, being disrupted from within. The balance of power between wealth of gold and fecundity of ideas was gradually changing--a change of which Balzac is the immortal epic poet. Yet, though the power of a Nucingen was increasing, and Paris was about to start on its new prosperity as the pleasure-ground of Europe, this precious _tout Paris_ lasted till the reign was over. Paris was small, in extent, in population, in the number of those who formed its opinion. Of its actual compactness as a city I shall speak in a later chapter; suffice it now to say that the boulevards of Montmartre and Montparnasse bounded it on the north and south, that the Champs Elysées was still a wilderness, and that outside the fortifications lay open country. The population about 1835 was only 714,000; railways were hardly beginning, factories only tentatively being erected. The working classes were chiefly engaged in commerce or _petits métiers_, and the heights of Ménilmontant smiled as green and as free from slums as the Champs Elysées were free from luxurious hotels. The passing foreign population, though there was a certain number of English attracted by cheap living, was almost negligible. Brazilians and Argentines, Germans and Americans were hardly to be seen; even French provincials walked delicately instead of forming, as they do now, the chief _clientèle_ of the Parisian theatres. _Le tout Paris_ was, therefore, a nucleus within a circle of three segments--the middle class, the aristocratic families, and Bohemia. The middle class, though the most numerous, was only potentially important at the time. Politics and money-making were its only preoccupations. It was divided, of course, into an infinity of grades, all of which may be illustrated from characters in Balzac's "Comédie Humaine." There were the bankers and usurers from the Du Tillets down to the Samanons, the successful merchants like Birotteau, the world of officials so accurately described in "Les Employés," the judges like old Popinot, and all the men of law from a Desroches down to his youngest clerk. Some were as sordid and bourgeois as the Thuilliers, others luxurious debauchees like the Camusots and Matifats, others, like the Rabourdins, fringed upon the _beau monde_. The sons of men enriched and decorated by Napoleon formed perhaps the cream of the middle class, and of these Balzac has given his opinion in describing Baron Hulot's son, who plays so large a part in "Cousine Bette":