complying is she to the vices of the French nation! Who has not
chanced to leave his home early in the morning, intending to go to
some extremity of Paris, and found himself unable to get away from the
centre of it by the dinner-hour? Such a man will know how to excuse
this vagabondizing start upon our tale; which, however, we here sum up
in an observation both useful and novel, as far as any observation can
be novel in Paris, where there is nothing new,--not even the statue
erected yesterday, on which some young gamin has already scribbled his
name.

Well, then! there are streets, or ends of streets, there are houses,
unknown for the most part to persons of social distinction, to which a
woman of that class cannot go without causing cruel and very wounding
things to be thought of her. Whether the woman be rich and has a
carriage, whether she is on foot, or is disguised, if she enters one
of these Parisian defiles at any hour of the day, she compromises her
reputation as a virtuous woman. If, by chance, she is there at nine in
the evening the conjectures that an observer permits himself to make
upon her may prove fearful in their consequences. But if the woman is
young and pretty, if she enters a house in one of those streets, if
the house has a long, dark, damp, and evil-smelling passage-way, at
the end of which flickers the pallid gleam of an oil lamp, and if
beneath that gleam appears the horrid face of a withered old woman
with fleshless fingers, ah, then! and we say it in the interests of
young and pretty women, that woman is lost. She is at the mercy of the
first man of her acquaintance who sees her in that Parisian slough.
There is more than one street in Paris where such a meeting may lead
to a frightful drama, a bloody drama of death and love, a drama of the
modern school.