grasping my umbrella, flinging around me (as
novelists put it) a light paletot, I make my
start. I had had a nasty morning of it. My
work had gone but indifferently, and I had
closed my desk with the remark (talking to
myself as those do who have no one else to
speak to)—"If people knew how much of a
man's life and health, of mind and body, he puts
into the page he writes, would they treat it, I
wonder, with more tenderness, and criticise less
freely?" "Not they," was my answer, for I
like to be just, and argue with myself,
contemptuously enough, as though that other self
wanted (and so he does sometimes) to mislead
me—"not they," I said; "what have they to
do, Horatio, with aught but the page before
them? What have they to do with thy sleepless
nights—with thine uneasy doze—haunted
by the images that have filled thine imagination
in the day? What to them is the history of
thy sorrows—thy disappointments—thine
apprehensions, thy life's follies, thy broken health?"
It is not long ago that I met, slouching along a
London street, one of the world's favourite
purveyors of amusement—one who has given delight
to thousands in his time. But what a wreck!
How old before his time! The clothes that used
to cleave so tightly to his full and prosperous
form, now drop in wrinkles round a shrivelled,
weak old man, who shrinks along with uncouth
gait, the ghost—the blank remains of what was
once—a genius!

For all these things, then, the public cares
not. And why should it? Do we work from
philanthropic motives, or goaded on by want—
want of bread or want of luxuries, as the case
may be—and by a strong ambition? If the
page is a good one, I have earned my money;
but if not, the reader says, and says rightly,
"The man is dull—away with him!"

It was after writing, then, an unsatisfactory
page—not of this work, I have burnt all the
unsatisfactory pages of this—but of my great
Essay on Men and Things, that I started as I
have described—the chest expanded, the head
thrown back, the moustache, which dates from
Folkestone, pushing vigorously—and my course
shaped—keeping about two points off the wind
—it was blowing hard that day—for Belleville.
[One word in parenthesis. I will most
certainly take the very next opportunity I can get
to make some remarks upon moustaches, their
growth and habits, with directions as to their
culture.]

My course shaped for Belleville. Is the
reader trembling in dread anticipation of a
description? Does he see before him a vista of
pages about quaint old houses, curious costumes?
Does he quail before a prospective enumeration
of the many points of contrast between the
French and English nations as exhibited in a
suburb? I hasten to reassure him. Among the
first words of this chronicle was a pledge that
from these things he should enjoy a cheerful
immunity. I guarantee him, too, against scraps of
dialogue in the French tongue. So courage,
and let us advance. I have a golden rule in
writing, to which I steadfastly adhere—to do as
I would be done by—to write as I would be
written for.

I should like, then, if I were reading instead
of writing, to be told of a man who, quitting
the Boulevard at its most joyous moment (all
alone), exchanges its asphalte for the mud of
the Faubourg du Temple, pursuing its long and
narrow street to the utmost limits to which it
reaches. 'Tis a strange thing to do. What can
he find attractive in a Parisian suburb? But
let us mark him as he walks along. Why does
he stop before that old hotel? It is a barren
prospect surely. What is there to look at? A
court-yard surrounded on three sides by the
house—the walls of old and shabby stone—the
roof both high and steep, with many windows
in its sloping sides. This is all. There is no
sign of life about the place. What does he see
to gaze at? What is there in that grim old
house that keeps him so long before it? It must
be that in some nook or corner of his brain
there are associations which the sight of the
house appeals to. It must be that he has
conjured up some pictures of the past which hold
him there entranced. Perhaps it is a vision of
French life under the old régime of which he
has got a glimpse. That house, now a boarding-
school for girls, must once have been lived in by
some old and noble family, and it is haply with
them that the lonely man is allying himself in
thought. Is it so? Is he thinking of that pale
old marquis, the head of the family, with
powdered head, with three-cornered hat, with
decreasing calf, and with the sword—that most
perfect finish of a gentleman's costume—still
hanging by his side? Has our wanderer got this
figure before him, the head of a family that looks
up to him as to a king, or is it the comely lady
whom the old man treats with such respectful
politeness, and with whom he has such stately
games at cards? Is our wayfarer thinking of
this pair—in whom of a surety no excess of
familiarity has bred contempt—or of their
children; of the sons dismissed, as soon as they
could boast a pigtail, to serve their sovereign in
the army; of the daughters, well governed
maidens, brought up in the chaste serenity and
the chill seclusion of a convent's walls? Is this
family—it is a pleasant theme for thought—is
this family, with its band of old retainers, who
have passed their lives in its service, and who
are strangers to a modern desire to "better
themselves," is this household present to the
thoughts of him whom we are accompanying in
his solitary ramble? If so, why that troubled
sigh as he turns away? Is it that the picture
he has conjured up reminds him that he himself
had once a hope, a prospect; that once the
thought of heading such a house himself was no
irrational desire, no wild ambition; that the
chance has gone, that he has missed the tide,
that the structure he had built in youth has
crumbled into dust? Or is it that he thinks of
the use to which the house is now devoted, and
remembering that as a school it must be full of
beings whose life is all before them, he thinks of