on the interesting subject of the
variation of the exchanges of Europe; and
Lobb was endeavouring to explain to me by
what fortuitous inspiration of rascality the
Neapolitan cambieri—those greatest thieves
of the world—were now charging a discount
of nineteen per cent upon English money,
and of no less than thirty-five per cent upon
their dear friends, the Austrians' metallics,
(which operation of finance secured my still
stronger adherence to the chorus of a clap-
trap song current about 'forty-eight; that
I had "rather be an Englishman:") Lobb
stopped suddenly, however, in the midst
of his exposition of the mysteries of agio
and decimals; and, bending his bushy eye-
brows upon me, said: "De blace vor de
peef is in the Rue Pictonpin." (He
pronounced it Bicdonbin.) I bowed my head
meekly in acquiescence to the enunciation
of this assertion, whereupon he continued
concisely, "Vriday, half bast vive," and
thereupon plunged into a history of the
credit foncier and the Danish five per
cents.

I noticed that Lobb, for the next day or
two, rather avoided me than otherwise, and
that he was studiously chary of any allusion
to the Rue Pictonpin; but, as I knew him,
though what is termed a "close customer,"
to be a man of his word, I was punctual to
my appointment on Friday evening. Lobb
was to be found at a great banking-house
in the Rue de la Paix,—a suite of palatial
apartments, with polished floors, stuccoed
ceilings, a carpeted and gilt-balustraded
staircase, walnut-tree desks, velvet
fauteuils, moderator lamps, a porter's lodge
furnished as splendidly as an English stock-
broker's parlour; everything, in short, that
could conduce to splendour, except money.
None of that was to be seen. To one
accustomed to the plethoric amount of outward
and visible wealth in an English banking-
house,—the heaps of sovereigns, the great
scales, the piles of bank-notes, the orange-
tawny money-bags, the shovels dinted in
the service of Plutus, the burly porters, and
range of fire-buckets even (suggestive of the
wealth of the Indies to be protected), the
counting-houses of a Parisian banker
present a Barmecide feast of riches. In place,
too, of the strong-backed ledgers, the fat
cash-books, and fatter cashiers of Messrs.
Crœsus and Co., the French seem to keep
their voluminous accounts in meagre little
pamphlets like schoolboys' copy-books; and
the clerks are hungry-looking men with beards.
Fancy Messrs. Crœsus confiding an account to
a clerk with a chin-tip! As far as I am
able to judge, all the disposable bullion in
Paris is displayed in little shop-windows
like greengrocer's stalls, for the special
admiration of the Palais Royal loungers, and
the accommodation of any Englishman in
want of change for a five-pound note. At
the banking-houses, the cash-box is an Eau de
Cologne box, and the principal amount of business
transacted seems to consist in stamping
bits of paper, executing elaborate paraphes
or flourishes to signatures, shifting sand
about on wet ink, and asking for lights for
cigars.

I found Lobb, that master of finance, peaceably
employed in his bureau, eating two sous
worth of hot chestnuts over a bronze stove of
classic design. Nobody came for any money;
and, peeping into one or two other bureaux,
as we left, I caught a glimpse of another
clerk signing his name all over a sheet of
blotting-paper, whistling as he scribbled for
want of thought, and of another absorbedly
twisting his moustaches before a pier-glass.
(A pier-glass in a bank!) Yet banking
hours were not over,—they never are in
France,—and I dare say business to the
amount of some hundred thousands of francs
was done before they closed. A shop-boy
let us out; a bullet-headed fellow with a
perpetual grin, a blue bib and apron, and
who, Lobb informed me, was even more stupid
than he looked. He was reading a novel.
And of such is a Parisian bank.

It was a pouring wet night—the rain
coming down not in the sudden sluicelike,
floodgate English fashion, but in a concentrated,
compact, fine unceasing descent,
cautiously and remorselessly, like the sand in an
hour-glass, or the conversation of a fluent
and well-informed bore. The mud had come
to stop a long night, and leaped up at you,
even to your eyebrows, like a dog glad to
recognise a friend. With the rain had come
his inseparable French friends, bad odours
and biting wind. They had the pavement all
to themselves, and tossed the passengers
about like ships in the ocean. There were
some thousands of ankles abroad, for those
who cared to see them; and the tortures of
the inquisition had been revived, in the shape
of numberless umbrellas, which were progued
in your eyes, jammed into your ribs, thrust
between your legs, and gave off cascades,
dexterously, down the nape of your neck.
Prudent people had all sought safe anchorage
in  the passages; the wealthy had
chartered carriages, and were deciding the
knotty point as to which is the pleasanter,
—to run, or to be run over. I met a
lamentable dog in the Rue Montmartre, wet
through. He was evidently homeless, and
was going towards the Cité, perhaps to sell
himself to a chiffonnier, probably to drown
himself.

I believe that there is no such street
in Paris as the Rue Pictonpin, and that
Lobb, for some occult reasons of his own,
gave me a fabulous address; for I never
was able to find out the place afterwards
by daylight; nor is its name to be discovered
in any of the maps of the twelve
arrondissements of Paris. We wandered for, it
appeared to me, hours; stumbling, splashing,
through streets which knew not foot pavements,