g, gradually to migrate
toward the setting sun.

When I first wandered about Paris there was little west of the Arch
of Stars except groves and meadows. Neuilly and Passy were distant
villages. Auteuil was a safe retreat for lovers and debtors, with comic
opera villas nestled in high-walled gardens. To Auteuil Armand Duval and
his Camille hied away for their short-lived idyl. In those days there
was a lovely lane called Marguerite Gautier, with a dovecote pointed out
as the very "rustic dwelling" so pathetically sung in Verdi's tuneful
score and tenderly described in the original Dumas text. The Boulevard
Montmorenci long ago plowed the shrines of romance out of the knowledge
of the living, and a part of the Longchamps racecourse occupies the spot
whither impecunious poets and adventure-seeking wives repaired to
escape the insistence of cruel bailiffs and the spies of suspicious and
monotonous husbands.

Tempus fugit! I used to read Thackeray's Paris Sketches with a kind
of awe. The Thirties and the Forties, reincarnated and inspired by his
glowing spirit, seemed clad in translucent garments, like the figures in
the Nibelungenlied, weird, remote, glorified. I once lived in the street
"for which no rhyme our language yields," next door to a pastry shop
that claimed to have furnished the mise en scene for the "Ballad
of Bouillabaisse," and I often followed the trail of Louis Dominic
Cartouche "down that lonely and crooked byway that, setting forth from
a palace yard, led finally to the rear gate of a den of thieves." Ah,
well-a-day! I have known my Paris now twice as long as Thackeray knew
his Paris, and my Paris has been as interesting as his Paris, for it
includes the Empire, the Siege and the Republic.

I knew and sat for months at table with Comtesse Walewska, widow of the
bastard son of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Duke de Morny was rather a person
in his way and Gambetta was no slouch, as Titmarsh would himself agree.
I knew them both. The Mexican scheme, which was going to make every
Frenchman rich, was even more picturesque and tragical than the
Mississippi bubble. There were lively times round about the last of the
Sixties and the early Seventies. The Terror lasted longer, but it
was not much more lurid than the Commune; the Hotel de Ville and the
Tuileries in flames, the column gone from the Place Vendome, when I got
there just after the siege. The regions of the beautiful Opera House and
of the venerable Notre Da