h no light in his eyes, with no strength in his
limbs, dragging himself with a dazed air along the boulevard--the belt
of his Venus, of his beloved city. What was his want? The sabre of the
National Guard, a permanent stock-pot, a decent plot in Pere Lachaise,
and, for his old age, a little gold honestly earned. _HIS_ Monday is on
Sunday, his rest a drive in a hired carriage--a country excursion during
which his wife and children glut themselves merrily with dust or bask
in the sun; his dissipation is at the restaurateur's, whose poisonous
dinner has won renown, or at some family ball, where he suffocates till
midnight. Some fools are surprised at the phantasmagoria of the monads
which they see with the aid of the microscope in a drop of water;
but what would Rabelais' Gargantua,--that misunderstood figure of
an audacity so sublime,--what would that giant say, fallen from the
celestial spheres, if he amused himself by contemplating the motions of
this secondary life of Paris, of which here is one of the formulae? Have
you seen one of those little constructions--cold in summer, and with
no other warmth than a small stove in winter--placed beneath the vast
copper dome which crowns the Halle-auble? Madame is there by morning.
She is engaged at the markets, and makes by this occupation twelve
thousand francs a year, people say. Monsieur, when Madame is up, passes
into a gloomy office, where he lends money till the week-end to the
tradesmen of his district. By nine o'clock he is at the passport office,
of which he is one of the minor officials. By evening he is at the
box-office of the Theatre Italien, or of any other theatre you like. The
children are put out to nurse, and only return to be sent to college or
to boarding-school. Monsieur and Madame live on the third floor, have
but one cook, give dances in a salon twelve foot by eight, lit by
argand lamps; but they give a hundred and fifty thousand francs to their
daughter, and retire at the age of fifty, an age when they begin to show
themselves on the balcony of the opera, in a _fiacre_ at Longchamps; or,
on sunny days, in faded clothes on the boulevards--the fruit of all this
sowing. Respected by their neighbors, in good odor with the government,
connected with the upper middle classes, Monsieur obtains at sixty-five
the Cross of the Legion of Honor, and his daughter's father-in-law, a
parochial mayor, invites him to his evenings. These life-long labors,
then, are for the