re given by
him and might be reproduced here with his signature. But the
publishers wish not to be deprived of the pleasure of paying homage to
the Vicomte Spoelberch de Lovenjoul.

He has made in the biography of Balzac, in editions of his books, in
the pious collection of his unpublished writings, the ideal literary
man's monument.

H. P. du B.

I

PHYSIOGNOMY OF THE STREET

Paris has curved streets, streets that are serpentine. It counts,
perhaps, only the Rue Boudreau in the Chaussee d'Antin and the Rue
Duguay-Trouin near the Luxembourg as streets shaped exactly like a
T-square. The Rue Duguay-Trouin extends one of its two arms to the Rue
d'Assas and the other to the Rue de Fleurus.

In 1827 the Rue Duguay-Trouin was paved neither on one side nor on the
other; it was lighted neither at its angle nor at its ends. Perhaps it
is not, even to-day, paved or lighted. In truth, this street has so
few houses, or the houses are so modest, that one does not see them;
the city's forgetfulness of them is explained, then, by their little
importance.

Lack of solidity in the soil is a reason for that state of things. The
street is situated on a point of the Catacombs so dangerous that a
portion of the road disappeared recently, leaving an excavation to the
astonished eyes of the scarce inhabitants of that corner of Paris.

A great clamor arose in the newspapers about it. The government corked
up the "Fontis"--such is the name of that territorial bankruptcy--and
the gardens that border the street, destitute of passers-by, were
reassured the more easily because the tax list did not weigh on them.

The arm of the street that extends to the Rue de Fleurus is entirely
occupied, at the left, by a wall on the top of which shine broken
bottles and iron lances fixed in the plaster--a sort of warning to
hands of lovers and of thieves.

In this wall is a door, the famous little garden door, so necessary to
dramas and to novels, which is beginning to disappear from Paris.

This door, painted in dark green, having an invisible lock, and on
which the tax collector had not yet painted a number; this wall, along
which grow thistles and grass with beaded blades; this street, with
furrows made by the wheels of wagons; other walls gray and crowned
with foliage, are in harmony with the silence that reigns in the
Luxembourg, in the convent of the Carmelites, in the gardens of t