"I was thinking that you ought to buy me a dress of mauve-coloured silk, like that of yonder lady."

"Tiens! Why, here is a boat's crew!" exclaims the citizeness.

"Tintin, come here, that I may explain to you the origin of rowing," observes papa. "You see those gentlemen in their dress flannel Guernseys

The boat's crew, rowing by, hail the passengers. "Hola! you, the little old man in the grey hat! Are you quite well! Thank you! Is that madame seated by your side? Our compliments. You could not be better coupled! Beg pardon, papa, but two ugly ones make only one. We can't go farther with you; our fry is waiting" (a fry of gudgeons is a sine quâ non on the Seine).

"Pooh! we have boats' crews in our sub-prefecture," ejaculates the provincial, "who can row in a different style to that!"

"A franc, if you please!" This from the bell-ringing, funnel-lowering mariner, who seems to be the whole crew of the Arcas embodied in

one.

"How is that? A franc ?" utters the citizen. thirty centimes by the omnibus."

"A franc, if you please!"

"Why, it is only

"But Tintin ought only to pay half price; he is only three years of

age."

66

Three in the steam-boat; at home I am five and a half!" shouts out the incorrigible.

"Pooh!" observes the provincial; "if we had such perverse children as that in our sub-prefecture !"

"What a splendid view! The park of St. Cloud! Polymnia! Tintin! Here is the lantern of Demosthenes. The common people say of Diogenes; but that edifice is thus baptised in commemoration of a tower, situated on the borders of the sea, in which the famous Greek orator used to exercise himself in declaiming with pebbles in his mouth. Tintin, who was it who went into a tower on the borders of the sea to practise"

"Get your tickets ready!" shouts the mariner. "What! are we already there?"

"Pooh! Is that the park of St. Cloud. sub-prefecture that is much prettier than that."

There is a garden in our

"Madame, the disembarkation is dangerous; give me your hand," insinuates the polite excursionist; and, carrying the action further than the word, he at the same time takes her round the waist.

"Dearest," murmurs the lover, "in the presence of these secular trees, I swear to you that my whole heart

The sylph apart: "I wonder if he is going to order dinner." "Well, at all events, one does meet with polite gentlemen when travelling," observes the citizeness. "But what is this! Why, my purse is gone!"

"Robbed, madame! No doubt of it. The charming gentleman! Tintin, may this be a lesson to you. In our time no one is civil save a thief. Repeat: What class of people are alone civil in our days?"

"Here is gingerbread!" shouts young precocious, perceiving a dealer in cakes and sweetmeats.

56

STREET TRADES IN PARIS.

IN Paris there are said to be sixty thousand persons who wake in the morning without knowing whether they will have anything to eat during the day. But they must all eat, and they find their food, although their existence is ephemeral, and truly from hand to mouth. With them, more than all others, the proverb is true, "Aide toi et Dieu t'aidera."

The lazzarone of Naples, when he has earned the four pauls which are sufficient for his daily bread, remains carelessly lying on the stairs of some palace, and gazes across the glistening sea at Capri, or the small smoke-clad peak of Vesuvius, and will not bestow a glance on a stranger, who wishes to give him a chance of earning something. The Parisian lazzarone, his civilised brother (to begin my account with the commissionnaire), has similar manners and inclinations, except that he must earn more than four pauls, for his wants as a citizen of the world's capital are greater. But in return he is a tax-paying citizen of the empire, and able to vote if not to be elected; in the great revolutions he has helped to make a republic out of the monarchy, and out of the republic an empire, and even under the present absolutism his vote is respected, always assuming that he says oui, or else- -But to my story:

The

The commissionnaire is in reality only a prosaic shoeblack, but in addition he is everything possible, and performs commissions of every description, as his name indicates. He is crafty, clever, and discreet, and, at the same time, honest, so far as such a man can be honest. commissionnaires form a separate caste, are inscribed at the Hôtel de Ville, and each has his number, which he must wear very ostensibly on a small brass plate. There are about four thousand in Paris, who, however, are divided into numerous classes. The commissionnaire of the inner boulevard stands at the head, and those stationed at the Boulevard des Italiens, and about the Grand Opéra, are fine fellows, who read their paper in the morning and smoke their cigar, and live more at the marchand de vins opposite than at their corner of the street. The latter do not enter into my category, as, thank Heaven, I have no dealings with the danseuses of the Grand Opéra and the other euses of that quarter, for such are the chief customers of these commissionnaires, who have often been introduced into the small farces of the Palais Royal theatre.

For two sous every commissionnaire will clean our boots, and tell us, while brushing, the latest occurrences of his quarter: there, a gas explosion, or an omnibus upset; here, a fire or an arrest; he has seen it all, and on each occasion was the principal acting person. A Parisian commissionnaire never has any small change, like the hackney-coachman : this is a principle, and the trick succeeds with many persons, especially strangers. They leave the poor devil the ten-sous' piece in order not to wait, for he inquires at three or four places for copper money, and, strange to say, cannot obtain it anywhere, as he assures us with the most serious face in the world.

The story of the black poodle on the Boulevard Montmartre, though twenty years old, is still told sometimes. Some of my readers, perhaps, have not heard it, or have forgotten it. This black poodle always kept faithfully by his master's side, and paid great attention to the passers by:

if a handsomely dressed dandy came along, the poodle thrust its forepaws in the gutter and ran off to place them on the dandy's boots. The natural result was that the gentleman must have them cleaned by the nearest shoeblack, and this happened to be the poodle's master. When the trick was blown, all Paris wished to see the clever dog, in order to have their boots dirtied by the poodle and cleaned by its master. The latter then appointed his four children as aids, as he could not himself satisfy all his customers, and in the course of a few months he saved up a small capital with which to establish himself elsewhere. The clever poodle was kept till its death as the benefactor of the whole family, and held in high honour.

But the commissionnaire is a man of rank among the Parisian ephemeræ, and hence has no poetical side: he is, with few exceptions, the prose of the boulevard.

Our boots are bright, and we have safely reached the Palais Royal, but how we are to cross the immense Place de Carroussel to the other bank of the Seine, where we are compelled to go to-day, in spite of the tropical heat and the want of an equipage of our own? If it were not for the Place de Carroussel, that sahara nearly a quarter of a mile in length, we might manage, for afterwards we should have the trees on the quay, and the shady side of the houses. At this moment a tidily-dressed man comes up to me and opens a gigantic umbrella, a perfect family tent, under whose shelter I can easily cross the hot square. I do not require much pressing, especially as he carries the umbrella himself, and walks reverentially behind me, so that I imagine myself an eastern prince under his palanquin. And all this for a sou-two, perhaps, if the story of the umbrella-bearer has touched me en route, a father with six young children and an ailing wife-a story which is always the same with but slight variations, and which you do not accept without hesitation when you have heard it a few times. But, good gracious, we must all live, though the philosopher did not see the necessity for it.

In a sudden shower we are in an equal difficulty: but help is at hand here. Because we have gone out for a week with an umbrella, owing to the rain, we leave the troublesome article at home, being taken in by a sunshiny hour. On the road there is a terrible shower, which certainly refreshes and lays the dust, but is not at all advantageous to our new hat. But at the same instant we see in doorways to the right and left of us ministering spirits who offer an umbrella on hire. Four sous the hour, and as a rule a deposit of two francs: for such an umbrella is not worth more, and hence the lender runs no risk if it is not brought back. These people also have a brass plate, with their number and the name of their street, so that they can be easily found. They are not either nearly so stupid as they look, and know at once with whom they have to do. If by chance a gentleman applies to them, they look up a better umbrella, and decline the deposit by saying very humbly: "Monsieur a l'air d'un sénateur ou d'un ancien Pair de France: cette garantie me suffit." Who could resist this and not pay double, for of course you need not be a senator or peer to gain the compliment: a good coat is sufficient. You can also give your address, and the umbrella lender will call next morning to fetch his property: but, as this of course entails extraordinary expense-you do not get off under ten sous.

With the hundred thousand other people we stroll along the boulevards,

an old and yet eternally new camera obscura of the strangest pictures, full of life and movement, and have offered our arm to a lady relation. A lady is indispensable, or else the new knight of industry we are about to introduce to the reader would not succeed: a man is too hard-hearted, and might laugh at him. The fellow comes close up to us, holding in his hand a small cage filled with sparrows and swallows, and says with a trembling voice as he points to the captives: "See, how cruel! to imprison the poor little creatures! Be merciful, madame: they are only four sous apiece, give one of them its liberty." A heart of stone would almost be touched by this, how much more then a female heart: hence, you choose a bird, which when set at liberty flies to the nearest tree and twitters its thanks. The man pockets his four sous, bows politely, and then assails the next lady who arrives.

"Oh, Helios! gleaming Sun-God, do not leave us!" Pindar sings in his thirteenth ode-at least Jules Janin asserts it in one of his feuilletons; but as, unfortunately, his corpulence (not Pindar's, but Janin's) is much. greater and more recognised than his learning, although he has a mania for strewing scraps of Greek and Latin through everything he writes, I cannot guarantee the quotation, as I have not a Pindar handy. I employ it, however, as it is so well adapted to my present subject. The poor people I am describing are bound to pray for sunshine and fine weather as the first condition of their ephemeral existence. All cannot be umbrella letters, and the countless other small means of gaining a livelihood almost entirely depend on fine weather. With the first bright sunbeam they come into the light, that is, upon the trottoirs. Lord knows where they were hidden during the rain!

Many of them have small tables on which they display their goods, stand behind them, and then invite passers-by to listen to them for a little moment. The talking is the main point, and many have attained such a pitch in their oratory that hundreds will stop to listen, not troubling themselves about what the chatterer has to sell, especially as he wanders to a thousand subjects, which are miles away from his trade article. But this is right and proper, and the more they patter the better the Parisian likes it. Many sellers keep their table carefully covered, so that nothing is visible, and then begin to talk about the discovery of America and Guttenberg, of Napoleon "the great," and the Imperial victories. Of course you have not the remotest conception what he means by all this, or what he has for sale: at last he raises the cover, and produces either a new blacking-paste or a small instrument to be used at once as toothpick, penholder, inkstand, and eraser, and only costing four sous, or so on. Still none of the crowd are ready to buy the thing: but this does not confuse our hero he distributes on all sides the flacon, or whatever it may be, and says, "You can pay me to-morrow, or when you are passing." At length there is a purchaser, and directly after ten, as no one wished to be first. At times it happens that the improvised dealer suddenly breaks off in his speech, seizes his table, and bolts with it, to the great surprise of his hearers, who look after him, and of whom only the initiated are aware of the true reason of this hasty flight. A sergeant de ville has shown himself at the next corner, for whom all the street sellers, who have no card of license, entertain great respect, as he simply takes them by the collar, and leads them to the prefecture, a proceeding which always ends

:

badly. We see that the daily bread of these poor fellows is not lightly gained in Paris: they often set posts at a little distance off, who by a shrill whistle announce the approach of the formidable blue uniform with the ship on the button, and then easily disappear in the mighty crowd.

Farther on stands another man, also at a small table, but he has no cause to fear the police. He is an artist, as he says, recognised by the government, and stands under the special protection of the minister. His excellency, he informs us, has repeatedly offered him a situation in the writing and reckoning-schools, but he declined it in order to serve the public. At the same time he is a perfect artist with the peù: with rapid, sure, and graceful lines he draws in a few instants an eagle with outstretched wings-of course the imperial one-" which has conquered the world," or the Vendôme pillar, or a portrait of Henri IV., or, lastly, the well-executed likeness of Napoleon I. He then offers them to the spectators gratis, and merely for the honour of having his talent recognised by an amateur. At the same time he sells steel pens, which are good and cheap, and honestly declares that his art is based on the pens, which persons need only buy in order to draw and write like him: "Il faut seulement un peu d'exercise," he adds, with a knowing smile.

A colleague on the other side of the boulevard loudly offers a hundred francs to the man who can mend broken china better than he. Five Napoleons-Heaven knows where he got them from, or if they are reallie on his table before him, and attract not a few gamins and flaneurs. "I could," he relates, "have long ago have been a rich man, if I would have sold the secret (of my composition) to the government. The director of the great porcelain factory at Sèvres would give half his fortune for it; but then my discovery would only benefit the few, while now it is common property," and so on. The bottle costs ten sous. He then feels in a heap of gay pieces of china, and very cleverly composes of the pieces a plate or a cup, which he strikes in order to prove the solidity of his composition, and finally assures us that he once mended a broken gun-barrel, with which its owner still goes out shooting. Really more cannot be expected.

Wherever there is a free spot on the boulevards, formed by retreating houses and broader trottoirs, it is at once occupied by a singer, an acrobrat, or a juggler: a large circle is formed round the artiste, who first harangues the spectators in the usual way, and then displays his skill. Such is Paris every day, and while we are swimming with the universal stream, we will loiter on, no matter where, for we are sure to see something amusing. We need only join that crowd, from whose centre we merely hear the words: "Quarante sous, messieurs, pas plus quinze, seize, vingt, il manque encore vingt sous: quarante sous, pas plus." From time to time we hear coppers falling until the artiste suddenly exclaims: "Stay, gentlemen; do not throw any more: there are already three sous too many. I only requested forty sous, and am a man of honour." But what will he give us for the forty sous? He is a tall, thin fellow, hungry-looking, and shabby. Before him, on the ground, there is a wooden box: it is very small, and yet he promises to get into it and have the lid shut on him. 66 Impossible!" everybody cries, for a boy would scarce have room in the box, much less so tall a man. The posturer laughs condescendingly, and simply repeats: "Quarante sous, messieurs,