her in despair, the son
anxious beyond words as to his father's future fate, and the daughter on
the point of robbing her cousin of her lover.

At seven o'clock the Baron, seeing his brother, his son, the Baroness,
and Hortense all engaged at whist, went off to applaud his mistress
at the Opera, taking with him Lisbeth Fischer, who lived in the Rue du
Doyenne, and who always made an excuse of the solitude of that deserted
quarter to take herself off as soon as dinner was over. Parisians will
all admit that the old maid's prudence was but rational.

The existence of the maze of houses under the wing of the old Louvre is
one of those protests against obvious good sense which Frenchmen love,
that Europe may reassure itself as to the quantum of brains they are
known to have, and not be too much alarmed. Perhaps without knowing it,
this reveals some profound political idea.

It will surely not be a work of supererogation to describe this part of
Paris as it is even now, when we could hardly expect its survival; and
our grandsons, who will no doubt see the Louvre finished, may refuse
to believe that such a relic of barbarism should have survived for
six-and-thirty years in the heart of Paris and in the face of the palace
where three dynasties of kings have received, during those thirty-six
years, the elite of France and of Europe.

Between the little gate leading to the Bridge of the Carrousel and the
Rue du Musee, every one having come to Paris, were it but for a few
days, must have seen a dozen of houses with a decayed frontage where the
dejected owners have attempted no repairs, the remains of an old
block of buildings of which the destruction was begun at the time when
Napoleon determined to complete the Louvre. This street, and the blind
alley known as the Impasse du Doyenne, are the only passages into this
gloomy and forsaken block, inhabited perhaps by ghosts, for there never
is anybody to be seen. The pavement is much below the footway of the
Rue du Musee, on a level with that of the Rue Froidmanteau. Thus, half
sunken by the raising of the soil, these houses are also wrapped in the
perpetual shadow cast by the lofty buildings of the Louvre, darkened on
that side by the northern blast. Darkness, silence, an icy chill, and
the cavernous depth of the soil combine to make these houses a kind
of crypt, tombs of the living. As we drive in a hackney cab past this
dead-alive spot, and chance to look down the little Ru