lass cannot go without causing cruel and very wounding
things to be thought of her. Whether the woman be rich and has a
carriage, whether she is on foot, or is disguised, if she enters one
of these Parisian defiles at any hour of the day, she compromises her
reputation as a virtuous woman. If, by chance, she is there at nine in
the evening the conjectures that an observer permits himself to make
upon her may prove fearful in their consequences. But if the woman is
young and pretty, if she enters a house in one of those streets, if the
house has a long, dark, damp, and evil-smelling passage-way, at the end
of which flickers the pallid gleam of an oil lamp, and if beneath that
gleam appears the horrid face of a withered old woman with fleshless
fingers, ah, then! and we say it in the interests of young and pretty
women, that woman is lost. She is at the mercy of the first man of her
acquaintance who sees her in that Parisian slough. There is more than
one street in Paris where such a meeting may lead to a frightful drama,
a bloody drama of death and love, a drama of the modern school.

Unhappily, this scene, this modern drama itself, will be comprehended by
only a small number of persons; and it is a pity to tell the tale to
a public which cannot enter into its local merit. But who can flatter
himself that he will ever be understood? We all die unknown--'tis the
saying of women and of authors.

At half-past eight o'clock one evening, in the rue Pagevin, in the days
when that street had no wall which did not echo some infamous word, and
was, in the direction of the rue Soly, the narrowest and most impassable
street in Paris (not excepting the least frequented corner of the most
deserted street),--at the beginning of the month of February about
thirteen years ago, a young man, by one of those chances which come but
once in life, turned the corner of the rue Pagevin to enter the rue des
Vieux-Augustins, close to the rue Soly. There, this young man, who lived
himself in the rue de Bourbon, saw in a woman near whom he had been
unconsciously walking, a vague resemblance to the prettiest woman in
Paris; a chaste and delightful person, with whom he was secretly and
passionately in love,--a love without hope; she was married. In a moment
his heart leaped, an intolerable heat surged from his centre and flowed
through all his veins; his back turned cold, the skin of his head crept.
He loved, he was young, he knew Paris; and his know