The Place de la Bourse is voluble, busy, degraded; it is
never fine except by moonlight at two in the morning. By day it is
Paris epitomized; by night it is a dream of Greece. The rue
Traversiere-Saint-Honore--is not that a villainous street? Look at the
wretched little houses with two windows on a floor, where vice, crime,
and misery abound. The narrow streets exposed to the north, where the
sun never comes more than three or four times a year, are the
cut-throat streets which murder with impunity; the authorities of the
present day do not meddle with them; but in former times the
Parliament might perhaps have summoned the lieutenant of police and
reprimanded him for the state of things; and it would, at least, have
issued some decree against such streets, as it once did against the
wigs of the Chapter of Beauvais. And yet Monsieur Benoiston de
Chateauneuf has proved that the mortality of these streets is double
that of others! To sum up such theories by a single example: is not
the rue Fromentin both murderous and profligate!
These observations, incomprehensible out of Paris, will doubtless be
understood by musing men of thought and poesy and pleasure, who know,
while rambling about Paris, how to harvest the mass of floating
interests which may be gathered at all hours within her walls; to them
Paris is the most delightful and varied of monsters: here, a pretty
woman; farther on, a haggard pauper; here, new as the coinage of a new
reign; there, in this corner, elegant as a fashionable woman.
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