ivilizing
agent than is generally supposed. By erecting substantial and handsome
houses, with porters at the doors, by bordering the streets with
footwalks and shops, speculation, while raising the rents, disperses
the squalid class, families bereft of furniture, and lodgers that
cannot pay. And so these districts are cleared of such objectionable
residents, and the dens vanish into which the police never venture but
under the sanction of the law.

In June 1844, the purlieus of the Place de Laborde were still far from
inviting. The genteel pedestrian, who by chance should turn out of the
Rue de la Pepiniere into one of those dreadful side-streets, would
have been dismayed to see how vile a bohemia dwelt cheek by jowl with
the aristocracy. In such places as these, haunted by ignorant poverty
and misery driven to bay, flourish the last public letter-writers who
are to be found in Paris. Wherever you see the two words "Ecrivain
Public" written in a fine copy hand on a sheet of letter-paper stuck
to the window pane of some low entresol or mud-splashed ground-floor
room, you may safely conclude that the neighborhood is the lurking
place of many unlettered folks, and of much vice and crime, the
outcome of misery; for ignorance is the mother of all sorts of crime.
A crime is, in the first instance, a defect of reasoning powers.

While the Baroness had been ill, this quarter, to which she was a
minor Providence, had seen the advent of a public writer who settled
in the Passage du Soleil--Sun Alley--a spot of which the name is one
of the antitheses dear to the Parisian, for the passage is especially
dark. This writer, supposed to be a German, was named Vyder, and he
lived on matrimonial terms with a young creature of whom he was so
jealous that he never allowed her to go anywhere excepting to some
honest stove and flue-fitters, in the Rue Saint-Lazare, Italians, as
such fitters always are, but long since established in Paris. These
people had been saved from a bankruptcy, which would have reduced them
to misery, by the Baroness, acting in behalf of Madame de la
Chanterie. In a few months comfort had taken the place of poverty, and
Religion had found a home in hearts which once had cursed Heaven with
the energy peculiar to Italian stove-fitters. So one of Madame Hulot's
first visits was to this family.

She was pleased at the scene that presented itself to her eyes at the
back of the house where these worthy folks lived in the