The object of this Paris journey was twofold--the writing a book in accordance with an agreement which my mother had entered into with Mr. Richard Bentley, the father of the publisher of these volumes, and the consultation of a physician to whom she had been especially recommended respecting my father’s health, which was rapidly and too evidently declining. They had been in Paris some time already, and had formed a large circle of acquaintance, both English and French. I was told by my mother that the physician, who had seen my father several times, had made no pleasant report of his condition. He did not apprehend any immediately alarming phase of illness, but said that had he been left to guess my father’s age after visiting him, he should have supposed him to be more than four score, the truth being that he was very little more than sixty. This, my first visit to Paris, lasted one month only, from the 9th of May to the 9th of June, and many of the recollections which seem to me now to be connected with it very probably belong to subsequent visits, for my diary, re-opened now for the first time after the interval of more than half a century, was kept, I find, in a very intermittent and slovenly manner. No doubt I found very few minutes for journalising in the four-and-twenty hours of each day. I well remember that my first impression of _Lutetia Parisiorum_--“Mudtown of the Parisians,” as Carlyle translates it--was that of having stepped back a couple of centuries or so in the history of European civilisation and progress. We are much impressed at home, and talk much of the vastness of the changes which the last fifty years have made in our own city, but I think that which the same time has operated in Paris is much greater. Putting aside the mere extension of streets and dwellings, which, great as it has been in Paris, has been much greater in London, the changes in the former city have been far more radical. Certainly there are many quarters of London where the eye now rests on that which is magnificent, and which at the time when I knew the town well, presented nothing but what was, if not sordid, at least ugly. But to those who remember the streets of Louis Philippe’s city, the change in the whole conception of city life, and the _manière d’être_ of the population, is far greater. With the exception of the principal boulevards in the neighbourhood of the recently completed “Madeleine,” and its then recently established flower market, the streets were still traversed by filthy and malodorous open ditches, which did more or less imperfectly the duty of sewers, and Paris still deserved its name of “Mudtown”. Wretched little oil lamps, suspended on ropes stretched across the streets, barely served to make darkness visible. Water was still carried at so much the bucket up the interminable staircases of the Parisian houses by stalwart Auvergnats, who came from their mountains to do a work more severe than the