ly in that
rather illegitimate species of campaign, which is tolerably ugly but
odd and composed of two natures, which surrounds certain great cities,
notably Paris. To study the suburbs is to study the amphibious animal.
End of the trees, beginning of the roofs; end of the grass, beginning
of the pavements; end of the furrows, beginning of the shops, end of
the wheel-ruts, beginning of the passions; end of the divine murmur,
beginning of the human uproar; hence an extraordinary interest.

Hence, in these not very attractive places, indelibly stamped by the
passing stroller with the epithet: melancholy, the apparently objectless
promenades of the dreamer.

He who writes these lines has long been a prowler about the barriers
of Paris, and it is for him a source of profound souvenirs. That
close-shaven turf, those pebbly paths, that chalk, those pools,
those harsh monotonies of waste and fallow lands, the plants of early
market-garden suddenly springing into sight in a bottom, that mixture of
the savage and the citizen, those vast desert nooks where the garrison
drums practise noisily, and produce a sort of lisping of battle, those
hermits by day and cut-throats by night, that clumsy mill which turns
in the wind, the hoisting-wheels of the quarries, the tea-gardens at the
corners of the cemeteries; the mysterious charm of great, sombre walls
squarely intersecting immense, vague stretches of land inundated with
sunshine and full of butterflies,--all this attracted him.

There is hardly any one on earth who is not acquainted with those
singular spots, the Glaciere, the Cunette, the hideous wall of Grenelle
all speckled with balls, Mont-Parnasse, the Fosse-aux-Loups, Aubiers on
the bank of the Marne, Mont-Souris, the Tombe-Issoire, the Pierre-Plate
de Chatillon, where there is an old, exhausted quarry which no longer
serves any purpose except to raise mushrooms, and which is closed, on a
level with the ground, by a trap-door of rotten planks. The campagna of
Rome is one idea, the banlieue of Paris is another; to behold nothing
but fields, houses, or trees in what a stretch of country offers us, is
to remain on the surface; all aspects of things are thoughts of God. The
spot where a plain effects its junction with a city is always stamped
with a certain piercing melancholy. Nature and humanity both appeal
to you at the same time there. Local originalities there make their
appearance.

Any one who, like ourselves, has wand