customers; the piquant faces and costumes of young damsels, who cannot
fail to attract the masculine customer; and (and this especially of
late) the length, the vast spaces, the Babylonish luxury of galleries
where shopkeepers acquire a monopoly of the trade in various articles
by bringing them all together,--all this is as nothing. Everything, so
far, has been done to appeal to a single sense, and that the most
exacting and jaded human faculty, a faculty developed ever since the
days of the Roman Empire, until, in our own times, thanks to the
efforts of the most fastidious civilization the world has yet seen,
its demands are grown limitless. That faculty resides in the "eyes of
Paris."

Those eyes require illuminations costing a hundred thousand francs,
and many-colored glass palaces a couple of miles long and sixty feet
high; they must have a fairyland at some fourteen theatres every
night, and a succession of panoramas and exhibitions of the triumphs
of art; for them a whole world of suffering and pain, and a universe
of joy, must resolve through the boulevards or stray through the
streets of Paris; for them encyclopaedias of carnival frippery and a
score of illustrated books are brought out every year, to say nothing
of caricatures by the hundred, and vignettes, lithographs, and prints
by the thousand. To please those eyes, fifteen thousand francs' worth
of gas must blaze every night; and, to conclude, for their delectation
the great city yearly spends several millions of francs in opening up
views and planting trees. And even yet this is as nothing--it is only
the material side of the question; in truth, a mere trifle compared
with the expenditure of brain power on the shifts, worthy of Moliere,
invented by some sixty thousand assistants and forty thousand damsels
of the counter, who fasten upon the customer's purse, much as myriads
of Seine whitebait fall upon a chance crust floating down the river.