OLD PARIS.
OLD AND NEW PARIS.
The city is made up of two distinct parts—the old and new. Old Paris, the Paris of Sue, and Dumas, and Victor Hugo, still exists, and its people are precisely the same as when these authors wrote of them. You leave the most splendid streets in the world, wide, and paved like floors, with enormous rows of palatial structures on either hand, as modern as modern can be, and in fifteen minutes you are in narrow, crooked alleys, with the quaint old houses on either hand, six and seven stories in height, with all sorts of gables, all sorts of deformities in the matter of walls; with the quaintest and most curious passages, and paved with the boulders which the Parisian of twenty or thirty years since found so useful in constructing barricades when they had their regular monthly revolution. And you see the same men and women who fought behind these barricades, and who will do it again—the wine shop politicians, who believe in “liberty, fraternity and equality” to-day, and accept an empire to-morrow for a change. A Parisian cannot endure monotony, even in a government.
Possibly he accepts imperialism, now and then, just for the pleasure of overturning it.