cheerful neighbourship in our four stories;
but our castles are our castles irrevocably and
intact, and we have our more than Eleusinian
mysteries. In an English lodging-house, a
tenant could not reside three weeks without
his avocations, his friends, and general social
position being more or less known, or certainly
assumed. But in our four-storied house, the
first-floor might be occupied by a wild beast
tamer (with his menagerie occupying the
boudoir), the second by a secret society of
Illuminati, and the third by a private lunatic
asylum, for aught the fourth-floor knew, and
so vice versa. Sometimes, after a three or
four years' sojourn, it is bruited about that in
one of the garrets lives an old lady who has
known Voltaire, Rousseau, and Pilatre de
Rosier, has supped with Sophie Arnauld, and
danced with M. de Mirabeau. Sometimes (as
happened the other day), a little old gentleman
belonging to the second floor, very fond
of snuff-taking, and leaning on a stick, dies;
and the neighbours hear, amazed, that the
defunct is such a person as Don Manuel
Godoy, prince of the peace, a man whose
fame has filled all Europe, whose name (for
good or evil) is in every mouth, whose
memoirs are on every bookstall on every
quay in Paris. Everybody has heard of
the Hermit of the Chaussé d'Antin, and
Paris is the only place where such a hermit
could dwell. I should like to see a hermit in
High Holborn, or New Bond Street! Though
the street door of our four-storied house
stands wide open, the porter and the
police are the sole depositaries of the secret
of our whereabouts; for which reason I would
specially recommend one of our four stories to
all persons fond of retirement or encumbered
with too numerous an acquaintance.

But I, the indigent philosopher, whose vocation
is to observe, and from the kennel of social
peculiarities, fish, with the crook of reflection,
queer fragments of life and manners—I, the
ragged moralist, may know more about my
neighbours than my neighbours about me.
Perhaps I have won the porter over to my
interests, perhaps I am one of that numerous,
astute, indefatigable, but ill-paid class, the
subordinate police spies of Paris. At all
events I know my four stories by heart, and
can (and hereby do) present a prose paraphrase
of Beranger's jovial lyric, les quatres étages.

To begin at the beginning: the house itself
It is an hotel with a small court-yard in the
Rue Coquelet, which, as everybody ought to
know, is in the historical Faubourg St
Germain. The Rue Coquelet is a silent street
made up of similar hotels, interspersed with
little milk shops, fruiterers', bakers', and
wine shops. For a mile on every side
extend equally silent streets, some half shops
half hotels, as ours; others occupied solely by
gloomy portes cochères, through which, when
they open (which is rarely), you may catch
glimpses of gloomy hotels. Silent streets
little shrunken shops, gloomy gates, shabby
little carriages, street-porters sleeping in the
sun, devout old ladies trotting to early mass,
stealthy priests gliding along in the shadow
of the walls, Dukes and Marquises,
chevaliers and abbés, yet abide there—black
silk small clothes, hair-powder, pig- tails, and
satin calashes yet linger in its solemn hotels—
but the ancien régime, the old school is dying
fast, oh! how fast away.

Our house, in the old times of wigs and
rapiers, petit soupers and the droit de jambage,
belonged to a Farmer-General of the French
finances. John Law and the Mississippi
scheme were the ruin of him, and he was
forced to sell his house to Mademoiselle Catin
of the Comédie Française, who suffered three
months' imprisonment at the Madelonnettes
for refusing to sup with the Cardinal
Archbishop of Carpentras, and who subsequently
married Milord Peef, "gentilhomme anglais"
who was no other than Tom Pilfer, who turned
his wife's four-storied hotel into a gambling
bouse, and had here that famous duel with
the Chevalier de Rougeperd which compelled
him to fly to America (with Mademoiselle
Catin's diamonds), where the war of independence
had just commenced, and where he was
hanged at Saratoga springs for deserting
seven times backwards and forwards, in three
campaigns. The community of St. Bumptious
afterwards settled down in the hotel, where
they set a brilliant example of orthodoxy to
the neighbourhood, and burnt an octavo
edition of the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau
with great solemnity; but the revolution of
1789 supervening, they were summarily
ejected by a Republican chief of the sections,
who gave a lecture every evening to a select
assembly of fish-women, and administered
justice to the aristocrats on the premises.
He however retired, alleging that the monks
had left so many fleas behind them that the
place had become unbearable; and as the
house had by this time got a bad name, it
remained shut up and deserted till 1806, when,
as it belonged to nobody in particular, the
Emperor Napoleon conferred it on one of his
senators, who furnished it from head to foot
in marble, mahogany, crimson, and gold, had
gilt eagles stuck on all the ceilings and over
all the doors, and a portrait of the "Emperor"
hung in every room. Came 1815, notwithstanding,
and the downfall of the empire.
The senator sold his house to a boarding-school
master, who sold it to a dyer, to let it
to a retired perfumer, who converted it into
what it is now—an Hotel Garni, or furnished
lodging-house, let out in separate floors and
tenements like the "Flats" of a house in the
old town of Edinburgh.

Our house is of no particular form or shape,
the four stories being piled one a-top of
another, very much in the fashion of packing
cases in a railway booking-office. A certain
number of rooms was what the architect
seemingly had in view, preferably to
symmetry of arrangement, so that if any order of