ONICLES OF PARIS.

THE RUE ST DENIS.

One of the longest, the narrowest, the highest, the darkest, and the
dirtiest streets of Paris, was, and is, and probably will long be, the
Rue St Denis. Beginning at the bank of the Seine, and running due north,
it spins out its length like a tape-worm, with every now and then a
gentle wriggle, right across the capital, till it reaches the furthest
barrier, and thence has a kind of suburban tail prolonged into the wide,
straight road, a league in length, that stretches to the town of
Sainct-Denys-en-France. This was, from time immemorial, the state-road
for the monarchs of France to make their formal entries into, and exits
from, their capital--whether they came from their coronation at Rheims,
or went to their last resting-place beneath the tall spire of St Denis.
This has always been the line by which travellers from the northern
provinces have entered the good city of Paris; and for many a long year
its echoes have never had rest from the cracking of the postilion's
whip, the roll of the heavy diligence, and the perpetual jumbling of
carts and waggons. It is, as it has ever been, one of the main arteries
of the capital; and nowhere does the restless tide of Parisian life run
more rapidly or more constantly than over its well-worn stones. In the
pages of the venerable historians of the French capital, and in ancient
maps, it is always called "_La Grande Rue de Sainct Denys_," being, no
doubt, at one time the _ne plus ultra_ of all that was considered wide
and commodious. Now its appellation is curtailed into the _Rue St
D'nis_, and it is avoided by the polite inhabitants of Paris as
containing nothing but the _bourgeoisie_ and the _canaille_. Once it was
the Regent Street of Paris--a sort of Rue de la Paix--lounged along by
the gallants of the days of Henri IV., and not unvisited by the
red-heeled marquises of the Regent d'Orleans's time; now it sees nothing
more _recherche_ than the cap of the grisette or the poissarde, as the
case may be, nor any thing more august than the casquette of the
_commis-voyageur_, or the indescribable shako and equipments of the
National Guard. As its frequenters have been changed in character, so
have its houses and public buildings; they have lost much of the
picturesque appearance they possessed a hundred years ago--they are
forced every year more and more into line, like a regiment of stone and
mortar. Instead of showing their projecting, high