artificial flowers round the ceiling, and your
bed-curtains tied with silken cords in a true-
lover's knot. All this you have. Countless
little dark corridors —now soup-smelling, now
sewer-smelling, but always narrow, and with
highly polished floors— lead to these chambers
of delight; and what a gratification it must
be to think that you can retain one of these
paradises at so low a rate as three francs a
day— that you are living in a first-class hotel,
and that on the first floor there may be
residing the King of Candy (incog. as Count
Sucre d'Orge), or the reigning Duke of Saxe
Schinkelstein-Phizelwitz in saloons with
malachite doors and velvet hangings, and who
have dinners of five-and-twenty covers served
every day ?

This is the great Parisian Hotel with its
salle-à-manger as large as the Guildhall of
many an English corporate town, and in
decoration a repetition, on a grand scale, of the
painting, gilding, and polishing of the saloons
above-stairs. This is the Hall of the Table
d'hôte, where confiding travellers pay blithely
their six francs, under the impression that
they are partaking of a real French dinner,
and of the ne plus ultra category. This is
the field of the cloth of damask; and, from
its extremities, issue the luxurious Tabagie,
or smoking-room, with its marble café tables,
and its emollient, elastic, velvet-draped
divans; also the salon, or drawing-room, for
the ladies, where you are to find the vrai
comfort Anglais, a floor nearly entirely
carpeted, a fire-place with a real English grate,
a real poker, tongs, and shovel, and an almost
total absence of the two pervading household
smells of Gaul,—soup and cigar-smoke. They
say the Tuileries is redolent of both odours; I
know the Luxembourg is, though that is but a
palace turned into a picture-gallery; so, who is
to complain of the Great Hotel of the Chinese
Ambassadors, if the perfume of the worst-
grown and worst-manufactured tobacco in
Europe, and of the fragrant but powerful pot
au feu cling to it like the scent of the roses
to the vase that is broken and ruined?

This is the Parisian hotel with its great
vestibule or entrance-hall leading to the
grand double staircase (more bees'-waxed than
ever, if perchance its steps be not of Sienna
marble), and its balustrades of bronze scroll-
work gilt, and its stair-rail covered with
velvet. The vestibule is crowded with
faultlessly attired waiters, talkative couriers,
pompous English flunkeys; with, now and then,
a flying figure in a white nightcap and apron
from the culinary regions, or a female
domestic employed in some back-stairs capacity
(for she waits upon no guest) voluble
in talk, heavy gold-earriuged, and scarlet
kerchiefed, head encircled, as it is the
wont of the French domestic woman-kind
to be. There yet wants the bureau —a
glass-case with rosewood panelings, hung
with an armoury of keys, and pigeon-holes
with numbers over, and wax candles in brass
candlesticks within them : the bureau where
sit the ribboned lady with her relatives, whom
you have heard of, passing the livelong day in
one slow, grinding round of Rabelaisian
quarter-hours, and drawing out those frightful
little accounts, which, when the feast is over,
make men laugh no more. There needs also
the double range of bells ; some of which are
always ringing, and are watched by a fat
man in a blue apron, the indoor porter, who
lazily nods his head to each oscillating
tintinnabulum ; and when the number twenty-
two has rung himself into a frenzy of rage
and impatience, calmly calls out to some
placid waiter, who is collectedly cracking
nuts in the sunshine, that he thinks the
Numero soixante-douze is on the point of
ringing his bell.

Little more is required to complete the
hotel tableau. Throw in a noble semi-
circular flight of steps leading to the door;
with one or two Englishmen, either railway-
rugged and vulgar, or shooting-jacketed and
solemnly aristocratic; the spacious courtyard,
with more gossiping servants and cooks;
a row of neat, brougham-looking vehicles or
voitures bourgeoises, with the drivers all
placidly asleep on their boxes; an Auvergnat
water-carrier; a big dog; a little boy in a
go-cart; with a black silk pudding round his
head; a knot of noisy, garlic-smelling, worthless
interpreters and valets de place pretending
to a knowledge of all languages, and
conversant with none. Then the outer conciergerie
or porter's lodge, smelling more of soup
and smoke than the whole house put
together, and giving forth sounds of a
jingling piano and the hammering of pegs
into boot-heels, and this is, I think, positively
all ——Stay, painter ! as a final dash of your
pencil, depict me, hovering about —unobtrusively,
but most observantly— a non-moustachioed
man, spare in stature, mildewed in
garb, forbidding in demeanour; who is not
anything particular, and does not want to be
thought anything particular, but who, for all
that, knows where the Rue de Jerusalem is,
who the prefect of police for the time being is,
where the commissary of police for the quarter
has his bureau, and what is the daily pay
of a mouchard, or gentleman attached to
the spy department of police, in a purely
friendly manner ; who watches patiently over
the movements of the guests at the great
caravanserais ; dispensing his silent courtesies
in a most Catholic and impartial manner ;
now playing the spy on an ambassador, and
now prying into the affairs of a commercial
traveller from Marseilles.

There is, I take it, in the great French
hotel, as in the great French palace, and in
the great French nation itself, a
wonderful mixture of the admirably great and
the absurdly mean. From the sublime
to the ridiculous there is but one step,
we know; but, in that excellent, generous,
inconsistent land, the sublime and the