y the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you
walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes
incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels
covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general
air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country
fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about
public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart
as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds
carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt,
amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was
transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830.

For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor
of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made
and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged.
People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after
'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with
weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had
grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant,
laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang
from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners
and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it
was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and
prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern
literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the
bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature
were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere.
Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by
Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people
crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that
first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by
Louis XVIII.

When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some
few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these
in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre
row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the
hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front
like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out
upon