thirty-six years, the elite of France and of Europe.

Between the little gate leading to the Bridge of the Carrousel and the
Rue du Musee, every one having come to Paris, were it but for a few
days, must have seen a dozen of houses with a decayed frontage where
the dejected owners have attempted no repairs, the remains of an old
block of buildings of which the destruction was begun at the time when
Napoleon determined to complete the Louvre. This street, and the blind
alley known as the Impasse du Doyenne, are the only passages into this
gloomy and forsaken block, inhabited perhaps by ghosts, for there
never is anybody to be seen. The pavement is much below the footway of
the Rue du Musee, on a level with that of the Rue Froidmanteau. Thus,
half sunken by the raising of the soil, these houses are also wrapped
in the perpetual shadow cast by the lofty buildings of the Louvre,
darkened on that side by the northern blast. Darkness, silence, an icy
chill, and the cavernous depth of the soil combine to make these
houses a kind of crypt, tombs of the living. As we drive in a hackney
cab past this dead-alive spot, and chance to look down the little Rue
du Doyenne, a shudder freezes the soul, and we wonder who can lie
there, and what things may be done there at night, at an hour when the
alley is a cut-throat pit, and the vices of Paris run riot there under
the cloak of night. This question, frightful in itself, becomes
appalling when we note that these dwelling-houses are shut in on the
side towards the Rue de Richelieu by marshy ground, by a sea of
tumbled paving-stones between them and the Tuileries, by little
garden-plots and suspicious-looking hovels on the side of the great
galleries, and by a desert of building-stone and old rubbish on the
side towards the old Louvre. Henri III. and his favorites in search of
their trunk-hose, and Marguerite's lovers in search of their heads,
must dance sarabands by moonlight in this wilderness overlooked by the