ito, a groom to a contractor, the son of
his uncle's porter. Our old pedlars complain that their trade is ruined
by the Counts, by the Barons and Chevaliers who have monopolized all
their business. Those who pretend to more dignity, but who have in fact
less honesty, are employed in our billiard and gambling-houses. I have
seen two music-grinders, one of whom was formerly a captain of infantry,
and the other a Counsellor of Parliament. Every, day you may bestow your
penny or halfpenny on two veiled girls playing on the guitar or harp--the
one the daughter of a ci-devant Duke, and the other of a ci-devant
Marquis, a general under Louis XVI. They, are usually placed, the one on
the Boulevards, and the other in the Elysian Fields; each with an old
woman by her side, holding a begging-box in her hand. I am told one of
the women has been the nurse of one of those ladies. What a
recollection, if she thinks of the past, in contemplating the present!

On the day of Bonaparte's coronation, and a little before he set out with
his Pope and other splendid retinue, an old man was walking slowly on the
Quai de Voltaire, without saying a word, but a label was pinned to his
hat with this inscription: "I had sixty thousand livres rent--I am eighty
years of age, and I request alms." Many individuals, even some of
Bonaparte's soldiers, gave him their mite; but as soon as he was observed
he was seized by the police agents, and has not since been heard of. I am
told his name is De la Roche, a ci-devant Chevalier de St. Louis, whose
property was sold in 1793 as belonging to an emigrant, though at the time
he was shut up here as a prisoner, suspected of aristocracy. He has since
for some years been a water-carrier; but his strength failing, he
supported himself lately entirely by begging. The value of the dress of
one of Bonaparte's running footmen might have been sufficient to relieve
him for the probably short remainder of his days. But it is more easy and
agreeable in this country to bury undeserved want in dungeons than to
renounce unnecessary and useless show to relieve it. In the evening the
remembrance of these sixty thousand livres of the poor Chevalier deprived
me of all pleasure in beholding the sixty thousand lamps decorating and
illuminating Bonaparte's palace of the Tuileries.

Some of the emigrants, whose strength of body age has not impaired, or
whose vigour of mind misfortunes have not depressed, are now serving as
of