sions Perdues" the offices of these petty
newspapers: the passage divided into two equal portions, one of which
leads to the editor's room, and the other to the grated counter where
the clerk sits to receive subscribers. Everybody knows the appearance of
these old houses, these staircases, these flimsy partitions, with their
bad light coming through a window whose panes are veiled with a triple
coating of dust, smoke, and soot,--the whitewashed walls bearing
innumerable traces of fingers covered with ink, mingled with
pencil-caricatures and grotesque inscriptions. Although it was in the
month of May that I made this visit, I shivered with cold as I entered
this old house, and my gorge rose in disgust at the unaired smell and
ignoble scenes which everywhere appeared. The clerk I applied to had the
very face one might expect to find in such a place: one of those
colorless, hard, sinister faces which are to be seen in nearly all the
scenes of Paris reality. All things were in harmony in this shop: the
air, and the light, and the house,--the letter as well as the spirit. I
asked the clerk to give me the file for the month of April. I soon
found and read Monsieur Taxile Delord's article. Monsieur Taxile Delord
comes from some one of the southern departments of France. He made his
first appearance in public in "Le Semaphore," the well-known newspaper
of Marseilles; but the twilight of a provincial life could not suit this
eagle, and in the course of a few years he came up to Paris. Alas!
Monsieur Taxile Delord was soon obliged to add the secret sorrows of
disappointed ambition to the original gayety of his character. His
deepest sorrow was to look upon himself for a grave and thoughtful
statesman, and be condemned by fate to a chronic state of fun and to
hard labor at pun-making for life. Imagine Junius damned to lead
Touchstone's life! He became sourness itself. His puns were lugubrious.
His fun grew heavy, and his gayety was funereal. The pretensions of this
checked gravity which settled upon his factitious hilarity were enough
to melt the hearts even of his enemies, if such a fellow could pretend
to have enemies. Once this galley-slave of fun tried to make his escape
from the galley. He wrote a play; and as the manager of one of the
theatres was his friend, he had it played. The democratic opinions of
Monsieur Taxile Delord raised favorable prejudices among the school-boys
of the Latin Quarter; but who can escape his fate? T