d were these hives, that rents were excessively
high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six
feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the
court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted
green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with
the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops,
strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the
products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a
rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers
of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept,
ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue
flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully
for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot
of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a
nearer view to be a satin rosette.

The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight,
a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once
been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all
the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises
were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian
public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might
have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious
people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than
the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or
of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked
fairy.

There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now;
and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles
begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but
in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais,
you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so
ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the
hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with
a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an
action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of
a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a
considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass