The city is made up of two distinct parts--the old and new. Old Paris, the Paris of Sue, and Dumas, and Victor Hugo, still exists, and its people are precisely the same as when these authors wrote of them. You leave the most splendid streets in the world, wide, and paved like floors, with enormous rows of palatial structures on either hand, as modern as modern can be, and in fifteen minutes you are in narrow, crooked alleys, with the quaint old houses on either hand, six and seven stories in height, with all sorts of gables, all sorts of deformities in the matter of walls; with the quaintest and most curious passages, and paved with the boulders which the Parisian of twenty or thirty years since found so useful in constructing barricades when they had their regular monthly revolution. And you see the same men and women who fought behind these barricades, and who will do it again--the wine shop politicians, who believe in "liberty, fraternity and equality" to-day, and accept an empire to-morrow for a change. A Parisian cannot endure monotony, even in a government. Possibly he accepts imperialism, now and then, just for the pleasure of overturning it. [Illustration: "LIBERTY, FRATERNITY, EQUALITY."] But the new Paris is quite another thing. All Paris was, not many years ago, like the portions of the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg St. Antoine, but the Third Napoleon intended to be Emperor all his life, and these crooked streets were not good for Imperial artillery, and the pavements were easily torn up for barricades. So he called to himself Baron Haussman, the prefect of the Seine, and said, "We will reconstruct Paris." The Baron, thoroughly devoted to the Emperor, and himself, called about him the best talent in the world, and the work was begun. [Illustration: NEW PARIS--BOULEVARD DES ITALIENS.] [Sidenote: HOW THE NEW PARIS WAS MADE.] But be it understood that the Baron and the Emperor did not go about this work carelessly. The Baron, whose ancestors were Israelites, had all the thrift of that remarkable race, and Napoleon was not much behind him. Whenever they decided upon tearing down the whole quarter and a score of crooked streets, and constructing a boulevard wider than the widest street in New York, they had an agent who, before the design was made public, went and purchased the entire property at the market rate. Then came the necessary legal steps for the condemnation of the property, and the payment therefor by the city. The new owner was allowed twenty or thirty times for it above what he paid, and vast sums were by this simple process turned into the Emperor's private exchequer and added to the already vast estate of the astute Baron. The Emperor used his share of the plunder in amusing the Parisians, but the Baron's share is still in his family.