arrow passage entered through a
turnstile, a description of which was said to be so wearisome in the
study entitled "A Double Life" (Scenes from Private Life), that naive
relic of old Paris, has at the present moment no existence except in our
said typography. The building of the Hotel-de-Ville, such as we now see
it, swept away a whole section of the city.

In 1830, passers along the street could still see the turnstile painted
on the sign of a wine-merchant, but even that house, its last asylum,
has been demolished. Alas! old Paris is disappearing with frightful
rapidity. Here and there, in the course of this history of Parisian
life, will be found preserved, sometimes the type of the dwellings of
the middle ages, like that described in "Fame and Sorrow" (Scenes from
Private Life), one or two specimens of which exist to the present day;
sometimes a house like that of Judge Popinot, rue du Fouarre, a specimen
of the former bourgeoisie; here, the remains of Fulbert's house; there,
the old dock of the Seine as it was under Charles IX. Why should not the
historian of French society, a new Old Mortality, endeavor to save these
curious expressions of the past, as Walter Scott's old man rubbed up the
tombstones? Certainly, for the last ten years the outcries of literature
in this direction have not been superfluous; art is beginning to
disguise beneath its floriated ornaments those ignoble facades of what
are called in Paris "houses of product," which one of our poets has
jocosely compared to chests of drawers.

Let us remark here, that the creation of the municipal commission
"del ornamento" which superintends at Milan the architecture of street
facades, and to which every house owner is compelled to subject his
plan, dates from the seventeenth century. Consequently, we see in that
charming capital the effects of this public spirit on the part of nobles
and burghers, while we admire their buildings so full of character and
originality. Hideous, unrestrained speculation which, year after year,
changes the uniform level of storeys, compresses a whole apartment into
the space of what used to be a salon, and wages war upon gardens, will
infallibly react on Parisian manners and morals. We shall soon be forced
to live more without than within. Our sacred private life, the freedom
and liberty of home, where will they be?--reserved for those who can
muster fifty thousand francs a year! In fact, few millionaires now allow
themselve