at city are instinct with character. Buildings
become to him like living creatures. The streets tell him tales. For
him, the house-fronts are written over with hieroglyphics which, to the
passing crowd, are either unseen or without meaning. Fallen grandeur,
pretentious gentility, decent poverty, the infamy that wears a brazen
front, and the crime that burrows in darkness--he knows them all at a
glance. The patched window, the dingy blind, the shattered doorstep, the
pot of mignonette on the garret ledge, are to him as significant as the
lines and wrinkles on a human face. He grows to like some houses and to
dislike others, almost without knowing why--just as one grows to like
or dislike certain faces in the parks and clubs. I remember now, as well
as if it were yesterday, how, during the first weeks of my life in
Paris, I fell in love at first sight with a wee _maisonnette_ at the
corner of a certain street overlooking the Luxembourg gardens--a tiny
little house, with soft-looking blue silk window-curtains, and
cream-colored jalousies, and boxes of red and white geraniums at all the
windows. I never knew who lived in that sunny little nest; I never saw a
face at any of those windows; yet I used to go out of my way in the
summer evenings to look at it, as one might go to look at a beautiful
woman behind a stall in the market-place, or at a Madonna in a
shop-window.

At the time about which I write, there was probably no city in Europe of
which the street-scenery was so interesting as that of Paris. I have
already described the Quartier Latin, joyous, fantastic, out-at-elbows;
a world in itself and by itself; unlike anything else in Paris or
elsewhere. But there were other districts in the great city--now swept
away and forgotten--as characteristic in their way as the Quartier
Latin. There was the He de Saint Louis, for instance--a _Campo Santo_ of
decayed nobility--lonely, silent, fallen upon evil days, and haunted
here and there by ghosts of departed Marquises and Abbes of the _vieille
ecole_. There was the debateable land to the rear of the Invalides and
the Champ de Mars. There was the Faubourg St. Germain, fast falling into
the sere and yellow leaf, and going the way of the Ile de Saint Louis.
There was the neighborhood of the Boulevart d'Aulnay, and the Rue de la
Roquette, ghastly with the trades of death; a whole Quartier of
monumental sculptors, makers of iron crosses, weavers of funereal
chaplets, and wholesale c