by the low, broad windows of the Salon de Lecture.

The Passage du Commerce is invested with historical interest, and mentioned in guide-books, on account of a remnant of the famous wall built by Philip Augustus, which is said to be still standing within its precincts. This relic of the twelfth century now supports the terrace of a garden belonging to an Institution pour Demoiselles, and to the uninstructed eye bears no traces of its dignified antiquity. To the eyes, however, brought expressly to the spot, in obedience to the instructions of Galignani and Baeddeker, the stones and mortar become as the jasper and amethyst of celestial cities. I confess, myself, to have always regarded the relic with chilling scepticism, until I one day happened to witness the rapt devotion of a tourist, posed, with open mouth and guide-book, before the inspiring masonry. I was immediately converted. Great is the potency of human faith! Rather than admit that so much fervor has been thrown away, we offer ourselves as believers-convinced, not by the doctrine, but by the disciples! Butchers, and bakers, and drygoods-stores, all establishments suggestive of the grosser necessities of the flesh, are carefully excluded from the Passage. There is a fruit-stall, where peaches and apricots repose luxuriously in their lined boxes, like the bare shoulders of beautiful women nestling among cushions. Next door may be obtained café noir for ten centimes; and a diet of coffee and peaches is all that the inhabitants of this enchanted region are supposed to require. Or, if they will lust after the flesh-pots of Egypt, in the shape of bouillon et bœuf and pommes frites, they must go elsewhere to seck them, and leave unprofaned a locality consecrated to science and art.

There is a chemical instrument store, with its airy stock of retorts and beakers and funnels, and all dainty baubles in glass and porcelain, and great masses of crystals, red and yellow and blue, like elements of very solid rainbows waiting to be combined; there is also a forge, set

up, not for common blacksmith's work, but for the manufacture of surgical instruments, bistouries, lancets, probes,an entire arsenal of torture, presently to be directed against quivering limbs. Pain, seated like a nightmare on the breast of humanity, can only be exorcised by Pain. It is Beelzebub fighting against Beelzebub; and yet his kingdom continues to stand in wonderful security. Thus considered, the glowing fire at the forge might be supposed to be borrowed from the bottomless pit, to give a fitting temper to the steel! But whoso pauses to lean on the blackened window-sill, to peer into the ruddy heart of the flame, and watch the brilliant showers fly from the smitten anvil, is presently carried far away from Paris and Beelzebub; especially, if he be a stranger, and an American, may he easily persuade himself that this is the very forge he knew twenty years ago, that stood in a green country-lane, round a sudden corner fenced with hawthorne, in the shade of a great elm whose branches swept the shed, and sheltered champing horses, and wide-eyed loitering school-children. There, the honest forge only yielded simple horse-shoes, suitable, and much needed in ploughing and in sleighing times; here are fashioned dreadful probes, sharp and terrible as two-edged swords, dividing body and spirit asunder. In another street, perhaps, a similar smithy is working at knives, destined to be wielded by the hand of an assassin. With the same fire, and out of the same steel, are wrought instruments of life and death, of pleasure and pain, of beneficence and crime. The same eternal substance shapes itself into endless varying forms, and chaos passes ceaselessly into creation, like the ocean upheaving into successive waves. "I make light, and create darkness; I make good, and create evil," says Esaias.

I am the slayer and the slain,

And I the song that Brahma sings. The weapons welded at the forge go out into the world to make the fortune of some eminent surgeon, descend to a spendthrift son, sojourn for a while at

the Mont de Piété, and finally, after many adventures, return to their original starting-place, like dilapidated Greek chiefs coming home from Troy; or almost so, for they lodge in the windows of a variety-shop neighboring the forge, and consecrated to the sale of Marchandises provenant du Mont de Piété. This is a rare wilderness of heterogeneity, a perfect shrine of medley. Underneath the saws and some intruding stethoscopes, is a collection of compasses, rules, and quadrants, and of mysterious-looking triangles, that seem more suited to the expositions of a Hindoo theologian than to those of a mathematical professor at the Ecole Normale,-associated with mathematics, perhaps because equally touching upon the clouds, perhaps on account of ancient community of ownership. Numerous meerschaums brood dreamfully in blue-velvet casesmeerschaums of all colors and shapes, from small and delicate white bowls, just tinting into golden brown, to gigantic heads of grinning prophets, and diabolical fantasies, contorted into such shapes as might have clung to Dante's boat in the lake of the Inferno. But a pensive charm invests each well-seasoned pipe, for it is steeped, not only in smoke, but in reveries, incrusted with innumerable fancies, that have floated from its depths upon fragrant vapor, and died, clinging to the embrowning stem.

Among the meerschaums are also dainty amber mouthpieces and lumps of crude amber, tawny as the thick seafoam, and strings of amber-beads, and necklaces of coral and onyx and cornelian, and unset stones of varying colors and various degrees of veracity. A complete assortment of optical instruments, spectacles, pocket-telescopes, opera-glasses,-every thing but microscopes, of which a second-hand store never possesses a specimen. Perhaps the owner of so precious a treasure would always sooner starve than part with it. On the other hand, watches abound, being indeed the standard article of deposit chez ma tante. I know one ingenious youth who pawns his regularly every month, for thirty francs, and as regu

larly redeems it as soon as his next allowance comes in. The transaction doubtless offers diversions to the imagination, which compensate the doubtfuldess of its financial advantages. But every one has not been equally fortunate in the redemption of his pledges; and that is the reason that these latter have been swept off from their temporary lodging-place, into the engulfing hoards of the second-hand variety shop. It is curious to study these whilom pledges, these baits that the unlucky have flung out, from time to time, to furious illfortune, as Russian travellers abandon their horses to appease the hunger of pursuing wolves. At what turn in the road did the case become so desperate, and the enemy gain so frightful an advantage? What ravening beast howled when this sacrifice was resolved upon? And what has been its result? Why have the travellers never come back in the day-time, to pick up their treasures strewn by the road? Did they escape, did they reach their destination; or, after all, were they overpowered, and do their bones now lie bleaching beneath wintry snows?

Vain questions, to which the unransomed baubles return but mute, unsatisfactory response. Some of them have been awaiting their ransom a century or two, to judge by the old-fashioned quaintness of their make, thick and bulky, with sweet-pea tinted pictures on the back, representing gallant tars firing off cannon, Lubin and Fanny in greenest groves, Sibyls awaiting Numa Pompilius, or else, faute de micur, Louis Napoleon; finally, several whimsical "timebugs," in the shape of hearts, more or less lacerated, as is the manner of hearts destined for public inspection.

Then there are snuff-boxes, bearing medallions of royal families, and legends to inform the same that their respective countries regard them as their only hope of salvation-a fact of which the families seem already complacently conscious; swords, daggers, enamelled sabres, tarnished epaulettes, silver pencil-cases and bodkins; an astonishing number of remarkable bronze images

and amphibious mantle piece ornaments, which have a scared look, as if guilty of an escape from the antediluvian collection at the Exposition; brooches, ear-rings, bracelets, and more mysterious brass triangles: such miscellaneous treasure fills up the well-stocked windows of this bewildering establishment.

After the second-hand variety shop comes a second-hand bookstore, one of those charming haunts that are as much superior to Hachette's and Harper's, as is the Maison Blosse to the Bibliothèque Impériale. Here linger poor scholars (scholars should always be a little poor, as libraries a little dingy), and peer over the stands through their spectacles, seeking occasional pearls amidst much rubbish. Here long-robed priests, threading the streets in unnatural isolation, pause to throw a glance into the only world they possess in common with the rest of mankind-the world of books. Yet even that is not quite in common, but fenced off into compartments by many impassable air-lines, into tracts of forbidden ground, guarded by many an Index Expurgatorium, haunted by many whimsical terrors and holy horrors. Hence the priest seldom tarries long in the Passage du Commerce, where the very air is revolutionary, and inquiring, and irreverent. On the bookshelves are too much Bernard and Longet, too little St. François de Sales and St. Theresa, to suit the ecclesiastical taste. So he presently glides away in his long frock, like a black ghost, and seeks elsewhere the nutriment appropriate to his cramped life and twisted intellect.

Besides the customers who come to buy exceedingly cheap, are the other class, who venture across the threshold more timidly, in the hopes of selling exceedingly dear. These are frequently fast students, who, having outrun their allowance, and pawned both watch and sleeve-buttons, repair to the second-hand bookstore with a portion of their libraries, to raise funds, not so much for the sake of paying the blanchisseuse, as of purchasing tickets for the next ball at

the opera.

Sometimes, however, the vendor arrives at this extremity through severer straits. Not the student whose claims upon the paternal purse are only limited by the temporary gruffness of the paternal temper, but the fatherless boy, sent to Paris out of the savings of mother and sisters, and knowing that there are no francs to replace those that have been lost or wasted or even honestly spent. He comes, perhaps in the fresh remorse of a first dissipation, preferring the bookstall to the Mont de Piété, as the more dignified resource; or perhaps, suffering more keenly, because his failure to make both ends meet arises from no fault of his own, and therefore he cannot hope to do any better in the future. The prospect of breaking down, of leaving Paris with his course unfinished, of defeating all the high hopes that are as bread and wine to the loving women at home in the provinces, this dreary prospect draws nearer. To put off the evil day, he dares a sacrilege; he takes down from its shelf one of the few handsome volumes left by a dead father, and offers it,-atlas, steel-plates, and all,-to the marchand des livres. But a rough old fellow is this marchand des livres, grown callous, like all second-hand businessmen, by many speculations in the reverses of other people. His range of prices is as elastic as the rents of an Irish estate, and similarly regulated by the necessities of his customers. Every volume he possesses represents somebody's ill-luck or vexation or overwhelming disaster,-misfortunes which are all brilliant advantages to him. So he takes his advantage, and pays insignificant prices for the atlas and steelplates; and their former owner returns home heavy-hearted, feeling that the evil day has been shoved back but a very little, after all.

Directly opposite the Salon de Lecture is a quilting establishment, dating, like Caswell & Mack's, from 1790, and entitled to all that involuntary respect which the well-balanced mind always accords to assured prosperity: assured, but modest, for the proprietors are three

sisters, each with such a remarkable squint, that her two eyes seem to be reduced to two halves, and the consciousness of this organic defect has evidently repressed all unseemly aspirations after ostentatious worldly success. They remind the classical reader of the Three Sisters of Grecian legend, who shared a single eye between them, and hence caught but imperfect glimpses of the world, as people who look at the sun through smoked glasses. Or, in their formal gray dresses, and gray, precise faces, arranged carefully like the backstitching on a quilt, they resemble three spikes of lavender, growing straitly against a wall, in resolute oblivion of the flaunting poppies and hollyhocks that straggle loosely on the gardenborders. However-owing, I suppose, to the modest prosperity-the three sisters have been married, individually I mean, not collectively, although I should judge it were the only act of their mutual lives that had been separately performed. But the husbands have already faded into some yet more shadowy background, or perhaps strayed away among the flaunting hollyhocks, and never been heard of since. They have left solid traces of themselves in three tow-headed children, that embrace the knees of respective, but scarcely distinguishable mothers; and the quiet hearts of their wives probably embalm their memory, after the fashion of lavender; but otherwise the place is as if it had never known them, and the quilting-establishment, unmindful of their absence, continues its business with all the noiseless tranquillity for which it has been remarkable since 1790.

Another sort of a woman than these demure, gray sisters, is the comely dame who assists her son in the management of a store for artists' materials, and who stands all day long at the door to receive customers, with the various attention befitting their varying importance. First of all, are the well-to-do middle-aged men, whose pictures now receive habitual praise at the annual exhibitions, or have even been promoted

to the apotheosis of the Luxembourg. To him that hath shall be given, and honor waits upon honor like the king's brother on the king. And it is pleasant to see these gray-haired artists, and know that their talent has made itself good in hard coin, and that their fine unearthly fancies have won for them earth as well as heaven. But somehow, it not unfrequently happens that the original lustre shows a little dim beside that which has been acquired, and the delicate golden aureole which encircled youthful brows, is eclipsed by the glare of real gold. Who fails may remain unworldly to the end of his life; but that is scarcely possible for him who succeeds. And genius has lost much of its original fire by the time that the heat has been expended in burning for itself appreciation upon the hard clay of the world. "Ah, me," sighed Alexander Humboldt, "to think that glory only comes with imbecility!”

It is the bearded, swaggering young artists, with plush coats and slouched hats, who are yet oscillating between the Desert of Sahara and the Slough of Despond, upon whom the glow of promise is still bright and unfaded. Youth is divine, because the direction of its upward flight is so indefinite as to seem infinite. Once the highest point gained, the curve turned, the parabola, however vast its sweep, tends steadfastly to earth; its form is definite, complete, harmonious, but the lovely illusion of infinite possibilities has vanished forever.

Probably this is not the reason that the comely dame secretly prefers the struggling young artists to the sleek and prosperous princes of the profession. But she takes a woman's delight in swagger and rowdyism, and all the recklessness that seems so grand to feminine helplessness. It is the same sentiment which often makes pious mothers secretly lavish more affection upon their dare-devil sons, than upon those whose meek lives, from Sundayschool upwards, has pursued a tenor as even as their own. "The running brook is na thirsty after the rain," says Elsie Bede. And, all Genesis to the contrary,

experience would lead us to suppose that the heart of Rebecca had yearned over the wild Esau with tenfold the tenderness that it had to spare for docile, girlish Jacob.

So our dame places chairs for her middle-aged callers, but she carries on long and animated conversations with the disreputable-looking young ones; and when they leave, with rolls of canvas or tinted paper under their arm, she watches them from the door, till the plush coats have disappeared from the alley,-a comely woman, probably the wife of an artist, who, having failed to sell his pictures, succeeded in selling the brushes; but around whose more plebeian profession always lingered a certain glamour derived from the earlier and more imaginative part of his career, -the glamour and the friends,-some of whom, perhaps, admired the fine figure of the wife, and even gained permission to model from it an Eve or a Venus, such as delighteth the Parisian heart. One among them, with more curly beard and darker eyes than the rest-but we have no business to pry into these old reminiscences, over which the matron herself draws a discreet veil, as she turns away from the door, and places her shapely hand on the shoulder of her fair-haired son, as if to recall herself to modern duties and proprieties.

After the prosperous and the interesting artists come the women, who are never prosperous, and seldom interesting. They work the hardest of all, poor things; never loiter in the Passage; rarely stop to buy apricots at the fruitstall, but rush hurriedly on the way from the Louvre to the Luxembourg, always laden with an unsightly bag, generally with a troublesome bundle in addition.-Women are never seen near the forge, nor in the reading-room, nor at the bookstore. Notwithstanding the orthodoxy of the tradition that represents the first woman as risking even Paradise in the pursuit after knowledge, the world continues to preserve a respectable prejudice, to the effect that the less women have to do with knowledge the better. Perhaps

this prejudice arises from spite--really a more rational origin than can generally be assigned to it.

A

But Art, divorced from Science, and consequently a little forlorn, like all divorcées, is quite at the service of feminine aspirants for fame, also a little forlorn. Poor creatures! They have a hard time; and perhaps the worst of all is, that the hardship tells so roughly upon them, and kills in them the grace and beauty which they profess especially to serve,-and the enjoyment too; for women-students are always afflicted with a preternatural gravity, strikingly in contrast with the lighthearted jollity of men in pursuit of art or science. Far from indicating more profound and effective devotion to the cause, this seriousness seems rather the evidence of uncertainty and self-distrust. It is like the preoccupation of a person, walking stiffly to avoid creaking his new shoes. Now, no one is really master of a position until he is able to laugh at it; and an intellect totally deficient in wit is rarely equal to the exigencies of the occasion, but inwardly weakened by some secret flaw. brusque, unforeseen movement might shiver it to atoms. Hence, some infer, just from the desperate earnestness with which women strive to keep themselves up to the level of intellectual pursuits, that they were radically unfit for them, and that all this standing on tiptoe can only result in strained nerves and overtasked brains. But others, less precipitate, shall only argue that women are not at ease in their careers, because these are as yet too exceptional, perched in high, bleak, and lonely situations. When two or three generations more shall have woven thick traditions, like vines, over these bare lodging-places, the inmates will begin to feel more at home. Then their ideals, lofty, but meagre as moonshine, shall be warmed by a little live blood, and become powerful and joyous realities; and the subtle self-contempt which now often underlies vociferous vanity, shall be pierced to its windy heart, like many another lean dweller of the threshold.