aris is
of comparatively recent growth. In the early nineteenth century the
boulevard from the Place de la Madeleine to the Rue Cambon was almost
deserted by day and dangerous by night--a vast waste, the proceeds of
the confiscated lands of the Filles de la Conception. From the
Boulevard Montmartre to the Boulevard St. Martin followed lines of
private hotels, villas, gardens and convent walls. A great mound which
separated the Boulevard St. Martin from the Boulevard du Temple was
not cleared away until 1853. From 1760 to 1862 the Boulevard du Temple
was a centre of pleasure and amusement, where charming suburban houses
and pretty gardens alternated with cheap restaurants, hotels,
theatres, cafes, marionette shows, circuses, tight-rope dancers,
waxworks, and cafes-chantants. In 1835, so lurid were the dramas
played there, that the boulevard was popularly known as the _Boulevard
du Crime_.

In the early nineteenth century the favourite promenade of Parisian
_flaneurs_ was displaced from the Palais Royal to the Boulevard des
Italiens, whither the proprietors of cafes and restaurants followed. A
group of young fellows entered one evening a small _cabaret_ near the
Comedie Italienne (now Opera Comique), found the wine to their taste
and the cuisine excellent, praised host and fare to their friends, and
the modest _cabaret_ developed into the Cafe Anglais, most famous of
epicurean temples, frequented during the Second Empire by kings and
princes, to whom alone the haughty proprietor would devote personal
care. The sumptuous cafes Tortoni, founded in 1798, and De Paris,
opened 1822, have long since passed away. So has the Cafe Hardy, whose
proprietor invented _dejeuners a la fourchette_, although its rival
and neighbour, the Cafe Riche, stills exists. Many others of the
celebrated cafes of the Boulevards have disappeared or suffered a
transformation into the more popular Brasseries and Tavernes of which
so many, alternating with the theatres, restaurants and dazzling shops
that line the most-frequented evening promenade of Paris, invite the
thirsty or leisurely pleasure-seeker of to-day.

Nowhere may the traveller gain a better impression of the essential
gaiety and sociability of the Parisian temperament than by sitting
outside a cafe on the boulevards on a public festival and observing
his neighbours and the passers-by: their imperturbable good humour;
their easy manners; their simple enjoyments; their quick intelligence,