sun; his dissipation is at the restaurateur's, whose poisonous dinner
has won renown, or at some family ball, where he suffocates till
midnight. Some fools are surprised at the phantasmagoria of the monads
which they see with the aid of the microscope in a drop of water; but
what would Rabelais' Gargantua,--that misunderstood figure of an
audacity so sublime,--what would that giant say, fallen from the
celestial spheres, if he amused himself by contemplating the motions
of this secondary life of Paris, of which here is one of the formulae?
Have you seen one of those little constructions--cold in summer, and
with no other warmth than a small stove in winter--placed beneath the
vast copper dome which crowns the Halle-auble? Madame is there by
morning. She is engaged at the markets, and makes by this occupation
twelve thousand francs a year, people say. Monsieur, when Madame is
up, passes into a gloomy office, where he lends money till the
week-end to the tradesmen of his district. By nine o'clock he is at
the passport office, of which he is one of the minor officials. By
evening he is at the box-office of the Theatre Italien, or of any other
theatre you like. The children are put out to nurse, and only return
to be sent to college or to boarding-school. Monsieur and Madame live
on the third floor, have but one cook, give dances in a salon twelve
foot by eight, lit by argand lamps; but they give a hundred and fifty
thousand francs to their daughter, and retire at the age of fifty, an
age when they begin to show themselves on the balcony of the opera, in
a _fiacre_ at Longchamps; or, on sunny days, in faded clothes on the
boulevards--the fruit of all this sowing. Respected by their
neighbors, in good odor with the government, connected with the upper
middle classes, Monsieur obtains at sixty-five the Cross of the Legion
of Honor, and his daughter's father-in-law, a parochial mayor, invites
him to his evenings. These life-long labors, then, are for the good of
the children, whom these lower middle classes are inevitably driven to