rdam and the Rue
Faubourg-du-Roule, will no doubt alter the character of the inhabitants;
for the trowel is a more civilizing 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 pl