looking-glass;
and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly
spoke as if some spring had been touched, "You see here, gentlemen,
something that God can never see through all eternity, that is to say,
your like. God has not His like." And out you went, too shamefaced to
confess to your stupidity.

Voices issued from every narrow doorway, crying up the merits
of Cosmoramas, views of Constantinople, marionettes, automatic
chess-players, and performing dogs who would pick you out the prettiest
woman in the company. The ventriloquist Fritz-James flourished here in
the Cafe Borel before he went to fight and fall at Montmartre with the
young lads from the Ecole polytechnique. Here, too, there were fruit and
flower shops, and a famous tailor whose gold-laced uniforms shone like
the sun when the shops were lighted at night.

Of a morning the galleries were empty, dark, and deserted; the
shopkeepers chatted among themselves. Towards two o'clock in the
afternoon the Palais began to fill; at three, men came in from the
Bourse, and Paris, generally speaking, crowded the place. Impecunious
youth, hungering after literature, took the opportunity of turning
over the pages of the books exposed for sale on the stalls outside the
booksellers' shops; the men in charge charitably allowed a poor student
to pursue his course of free studies; and in this way a duodecimo volume
of some two hundred pages, such as _Smarra_ or _Pierre Schlemihl_, or
_Jean Sbogar_ or _Jocko_, might be devoured in a couple of afternoons.
There was something very French in this alms given to the young, hungry,
starved intellect. Circulating libraries were not as yet; if you wished
to read a book, you were obliged to buy it, for which reason novels
of the early part of the century were sold in numbers which now seem
well-nigh fabulous to us.

But the poetry of this terrible mart appeared in all its splendor at
the close of the day. Women of the town, flocking in and out from the
neighboring streets, were allowed to make a promenade of the Wooden
Galleries. Thither came prostitutes from every quarter of Paris to "do
the Palais." The Stone Galleries belonged to privileged houses, which
paid for the right of exposing women dressed like princesses under
such and such an arch, or in the corresponding space of garden; but the
Wooden Galleries were the common ground of women of the streets.
This was _the_ Palais, a word which used to signify the te