toll, and the municipality of Paris is less sharp in collecting
the city-dues than the servants are in taking theirs on every single
thing. To say nothing of fifty per cent charged on every form of food,
they demand large New Year's premiums from the tradesmen. The best
class of dealers tremble before this occult power, and subsidize it
without a word--coachmakers, jewelers, tailors, and all. If any
attempt is made to interfere with them, the servants reply with
impudent retorts, or revenge themselves by the costly blunders of
assumed clumsiness; and in these days they inquire into their master's
character as, formerly, the master inquired into theirs. This mischief
is now really at its height, and the law-courts are beginning to take
cognizance of it; but in vain, for it cannot be remedied but by a law
which shall compel domestic servants, like laborers, to have a
pass-book as a guarantee of conduct. Then the evil will vanish as if
by magic. If every servant were obliged to show his pass-book, and if
masters were required to state in it the cause of his dismissal, this
would certainly prove a powerful check to the evil.

The men who are giving their attentions to the politics of the day
know not to what lengths the depravity of the lower classes has gone.
Statistics are silent as to the startling number of working men of
twenty who marry cooks of between forty and fifty enriched by robbery.
We shudder to think of the result of such unions from the three points
of view of increasing crime, degeneracy of the race, and miserable
households.

As to the mere financial mischief that results from domestic
peculation, that too is immense from a political point of view. Life
being made to cost double, any superfluity becomes impossible in most
households. Now superfluity means half the trade of the world, as it
is half the elegance of life. Books and flowers are to many persons as
necessary as bread.

Lisbeth, well aware of this dreadful scourge of Parisian households,
determined to manage Valerie's, promising her every assistance in the
terrible scene when the two women had sworn to be like sisters. So she
had brought from the depths of the Vosges a humble relation on her
mother's side, a very pious and honest soul, who had been cook to the
Bishop of Nancy. Fearing, however, her inexperience of Paris ways, and
yet more the evil counsel which wrecks such fragile virtue, at first
Lisbeth always went to market with Mathurine,