ceaselessly clamouring for comfort and cheapness
-- been able to bring the establishment
in which we pass so large a portion of our
restless lives. What is an hotel in eighteen
hundred and fifty-six ?

The hotel in Paris, what is that like ? I
think it is a huge barrack of a place, no
one knows exactly how many storeys high;
because no one knows where the servants
and waiters sleep; their beds being always
some flights above the loftiest occupied
by any of the lodgers: far, far above the
cinquième. If ever you pass the palace
of the Tuileries by night, and watch
the lights glimmering from little casements
one above another—still ascending,
coruscating the slated roof, mingling with the
chimney-pots, and at last shouldering the
stars in the sky almost, and winking at them
as if in companionship — you will be able to
form an idea of the number of storeys a
first-class Paris hotel consists of. It must
be more crowded than a palace (though
occupying less space), since it frequently
lodges a king or two on the first-floor, a
sovereign duke on the second, and a Kamschatkan
ambassador on the ground-floor, all with their
respective suites; and, in addition to the
regular hotel-lodgers fugacious and permanent,
the hairdresser, the tailor, and the
boot-maker, who are announced to have their
place of business dans l'hotel. The building
includes, of course, a vaste jardin, a spacious
court-yard, coach-houses and stables for the
carriages and studs of the wandering English
nobility ; a suite of apartments for the landlord
and his family ; a smaller set for that
dweller on the threshold, the lodge-keeper
and his family ; a long range of kitchens and
offices ; the public saloon for table d'hôtes
(always advertised as the biggest in Paris),
and, indispensably, a complete hummums or
pile of buildings devoted to hot and cold
baths.

All this is in a narrow street with no
perceptible frontage, and hemmed in by tall
houses, always threatening to topple over,
always being pulled down by the authorities,
and always, of course, Pour cause de
prolongation de la Rue de Rivoli. The vast
garden is hemmed in by other tall houses; the
hot and cold baths have an entrance in an
alley, seemingly half-a-dozen streets off; and,
when you have walked a few hundred yards
in another direction, and turned to the right
and the left, and think you are on your way
to the Seine, you look up, and see a great
blank wall staring behind a barricade of
chimney-pots, and stencilled high up,
somewhere about the seventh heaven, that this
is the Grand Hôtel des Empereurs Chinois;
which you thought you had got rid of, but
which you can't get rid of, and which follows
you about and pervades all Paris.

The number of clocks (all gilt, and with
pedestals representing groups from the Iliad
or the Æneid, and afl with thin-blown glass
cases, which the chamberman breaks with the
handle of his feather-broom, and you are
charged a hundred francs in the bill, for not
breaking)—the number of clocks, I say, is
simply incalculable; because every apartment,
from the drawing-room of the Kamschatkan
ambassador on the ground-floor, to the
undiscoverable sky-parlours in the roof, occupied
by the scullions and floor-polishers, has its
clock on the mantelpiece. None of these
clocks keep any time, save their own; which
is a distracting, inconsistent, and hideous
mockery of chronology. They make unearthly
noises in the night season; sometimes as if
they had swollen tonsils, sometimes as
though they were possessed by demons in
their inner works. Invariably —at unseasonable
times when you are in bed, and falling in
or out of a refreshing sleep—the door is
opened to give entrance to an unexpressive
man in a black velvet cap, who scrutinises you
with a half complimentary expression, as if you
were a new-found acquaintance: half
disparagingly—as if he were a broker come to take
stock of your personal effects; but, on the
whole, authoritatively, as if he knew that you
owed or must owe him money, and he had
your comfort and your luggage in his hands.
This individual, armed with a great iron
instrument of torture, proceeds to wind up
the clock; which doesn't seem to like the
operation at all, and moans piteously; then
the mysterious operator shuffles out on his
carpet-slippers, and the clock goes worse
than ever; and you catch the next flying
waiter who brushes past your door; and, asking
him who the clock-torturer is, are told that
it is Monsieur, by blue! who is a sergeant in
the national guard, a great frequenter of
cafés, an ardent speculator on the Bourse, a
revered authority at dominos, and a complete
nonentity and cipher standing for zero in
the house of which he is landlord and
proprietor.

Yes, he is the landlord: although hitherto
you have been accustomed to regard as the
supreme authority of the establishment, Madame,
the dressy young matron, in the gold chain
and ribbons, who sits down-stairs in the rose-
wooded and pier-glassed bureau, with a white-
headed grandmother, probably ninety years
old, on one side, and a blooming jeune personne
demure, (precisely dressed; pretty and speechless)
on the other,—a young person who
works interminable crochet, and makes out
endless bills of indictment against travellers,
arraigning them for their culpable consumption
of wax-candles and beetroot-sugar;
patiently awaiting the time when she shall be
claimed by some other clock-winder, domino-
loving and café-hunting; and, with her
hundred thousand francs of dowry, go to
occupy the bureaucratic throne of some other
hotel.

French hotel landlords seldom appear to
you under any other guise than this. They wind
up your clocks, and you see them no more till