incredible to a younger generation.

The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless
hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was
covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens,
pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the
court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy,
but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be
found in little wineshops in the suburbs.

The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were
formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front
upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place,
and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of
the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were
excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a
space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon
the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight
trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from
continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth
at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to
science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing
industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a
sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered
blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon
streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural
flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of
millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the
dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette.