althy tourist of other nations, on whom its prosperity is
so largely dependent, especially since it has no longer the attractions
of a royal or imperial court to offer. No presentation of the city of
Paris at the present day would be complete without documents giving the
opinions of its own cultured and intelligent classes on its general
characteristics and its most urgent needs. With regard to this question
of dependence upon strangers, endless quotations might be cited, and two
or three may well be printed here as more valuable contributions to this
contemporary history than any speculations by mere foreigners. The
_Revue Encyclopedique_, published weekly by the great house of Larousse,
has a column which it devotes to _ideas of general interest_,
underscored, and in this column appeared, in the issue of January 23,
1897, the following communication: "For some time past the Avenue de
L'Opera, at Paris, has been lighted by electricity by means of
incandescent lamps placed along the central axis of this great
thoroughfare. This very handsome illumination serves only to accentuate
more strongly the monotonous melancholy of the double row of commercial
establishments the fronts of which are invariably closed at eight
o'clock in the evening.... And sorrowful reflections are awakened of the
brilliant evenings of thirty years ago, the movement of foreigners along
the boulevards, the crowd of promenaders constantly changing before the
dazzling show-windows of the end of the Second Empire. Why is not some
effort made to revive this brilliant past by creating attractions
capable of arousing the curiosity of the Parisians and, above all, of
the foreigners? Could not some arrangement be made among all the
shop-keepers of the grand boulevards and of the principal adjacent
streets (Rue de la Paix, Rue Royale, Avenue de l'Opera, etc.), that one
evening a week be devoted to the exceptional adornment of their
establishments?" And the writer goes on to suggest, with Parisian
ingenuity, that a jury of artists might even be constituted to decide
which display was the most brilliant and the most worthy, and to award
suitable recompense. "By this means it is probable that the street and
the boulevard would resume their former animation, to the great profit
of the trade in articles of luxury, so profoundly affected by the
desertion of the foreigners."

In the year of grace, 1898, the Parisian world was greatly agitated by
the fact that the