from Baltimore and knew no more what she was doing or whither she was
drifting than a baby. The old, old story: a comfortable home and a good
husband; even a child or two; a scoundrel, a scandal, an elopement, and
the inevitable desertion. Left without a dollar in the streets of Paris.
She was under convoy of a noted procuress.

"A duke or the morgue," she whimpered, "in six months."

Three months sufficed. They dragged all that remained of her out of the
Seine, and then the whole of the pitiful disgrace and tragedy came out.

V

If ever I indite a volume to be entitled Adventures in Paris it will
contain not a line to feed any prurient fancy, but will embrace the
record of many little journeys between the Coiffeur and the Marche
des Fleurs, with maybe an excursion among the cemeteries and the
restaurants.

Each city is as one makes it for himself. Paris has contributed greatly
to my appreciation, and perhaps my knowledge, of history and literature
and art and life. I have seen it in all its aspects; under the empire,
when the Due de Morny was king of the Bourse and Mexico was to make
every Frenchman rich; after the commune and the siege, when the Hotel de
Ville was in ruins, the palace of the Tuileries still aflame, the column
gone from the Place Vendome, and everything a blight and waste; and I
have marked it rise from its ashes, grandly, proudly, and like a
queen come to her own again, resume its primacy as the only complete
metropolis in all the universe.

There is no denying it. No city can approach Paris in structural unity
and regality, in things brilliant and beautiful, in buoyancy, variety,
charm and creature comfort. Drunkenness, of the kind familiar to London
and New York, is invisible to Paris. The brandy and absinthe habit has
been greatly exaggerated. In truth, everywhere in Europe the use of
intoxicants is on the decline. They are, for the first time in France,
stimulated partly by the alarming adulteration of French wines,
rigorously applying and enforcing the pure-food laws.

As a consequence, there is a palpable and decided improvement of the
vintage of the Garonne and the Champagne country. One may get a good
glass of wine now without impoverishing himself. As men drink wine, and
as the wine is pure, they fall away from stronger drink. I have
always considered, with Jefferson, the brewery in America an excellent
temperance society. That which works otherwise is the dive which too
often