you don't pay your bill ; when they pursue
you with the rigour of the law, and arrest
you. I knew one landlord in one of the
stateliest hotels in Paris who deviated from this
rule. He was—no other term more refined,
less idiomatic will serve—an out-and-out
swell. He had his brougham, from which I
have often seen him stepping at the doors of
expensive restaurants and boulevard shops,
accompanied by a lady in velvet, crinoline,
ringlets, and jewels, followed by a little dog
in a paletôt, and who was not the lady in
ribbons whom I have seen in the bureau. He
used to breakfast at a table by himself in
the graude salle-à-manger, and drink the very
best of wines, call off the waiter who was
attending on me, and behaved just as if he
were a real traveller who paid his bill. I
met him one night in the orchestra-stalls of
the Théâtre Français; he was attired like the
Muscovite proprietor of many thousand serfs
of the Ukraine; and he looked at me with a
vague superciliousness, as if it had occurred
to him, mentally, " I must have seen that (ça)
somewhere before; he may be, perhaps, one
of the wandering aliens to whom I
condescended to give hospitality in my palatial hotel;
but, at all events, that is evidently a thing of
very little consequence; has probably come to
the theatre with an order, and I need not
trouble myself as to whom that may be."

It may, perhaps, have been a judgment upon
this exceptional landlord that he failed shortly
afterwards, and for something huge in the way
of thousands of francs. An arrangement of a
separation from bed and board description
took place between him and the legitimate
proprietor of the ribbons, and he was so
reduced that he was obliged to become chairman
of an assurance company or director
of a railway, or something penurious of that
sort.

This is the great Paris Hotel—with its
suites upon suites of rooms; its gilded and
painted and satin-hung saloons for kings
and ambassadors; its mean little slices of
bedchambers for bachelors and dependents
(narrow make-shift apartments with beds in
alcoves) beds with delightful spring
mattresses that send you up ceiling-wards, like
Jack in the box, and sometimes tilt you on
to the floor playfully; which floor, being bees-
waxed and varnished to the polish of a mirror,
affords you admirable opportunities for studying
the art of in-door skating. You have a
little scrap of carpet, seemingly torn from
the bottom of a defunct Eastern Counties'
Railway carriage; unsubstantial chairs, clad
in red velvet,—of course, a really comfortable
arm-chair; a most uncomfortable table, if
you wish to write, for it is all legs and cross-
bars and has no available top; a horrible little
gulf, misnamed a fire-place; where you
incur sciatica in kneeling down to light the
fire, and disease of the lungs in blowing the
damp green wood. Perhaps, you succeed at
last—after a despairing expenditure of time,
patience, and fuel, and pulling up and down
a little iron screen, or blower, which has the
perversity of five thousand female imps, and
sometimes will descend, and more frequently
will see you at Jericho first —in kindling a
diminutive, sputtering little blaze, the major
part of which goes up the chimney (and often
sets it on fire), while the remainder deposits a
modicum of caloric on the toes of your boots,
and sends a momentary thaw to the tip
of your frost-bitten nose once in a dozen
hours. You have a chest of drawers, with a
grand mahogany top, but with all the rest
sham— sham keys, sham drawers (to judge
by their obstinate refusal to open), sham
locks, and especially sham handles; which
last artfully pretend to give you a good
purchase to pull open a drawer, and then come
off, sarcastically, in your hands, and throw
you backward. These interesting articles of
furniture are plentifully provided with skirtings
bronze cornices, and sham veneering
work, which tumbles off of its own accord to
your destruction, and for which you are made
to pay.

With a nicely damped ceiling; with
partition-walls just thick or thin enough for
you to hear your next-door neighbour every
time he turns in bed, and for you to have the
agreeable certainty that he has heard every
word of your ill-tempered soliloquy on the
subject of the fire; with a wash-hand basin
not much bigger than a pie-dish; an ewer
about the size of a pint pot, and two towels
almost equalling, in superficial area and
variety of hue of ironmould, the pocket
handkerchiefs on which the flags of all nations are
printed—(by this hand the very vast majority
of continental hotel-keepers have not yet
modified their views on the quantity of water
necessary for purposes of ablution!*); with
a little dark dressing closet, utterly useless
from its obscurity for any toilette purposes,
but which is full of clothes' pegs, gloomily
tempting Miserrimus, who has but one coat,
to hang himself on one of the vacant pegs;
with in all seasons an insufficient quantity of
sheets and blankets—the former of strange
texture and full of ribbed seams; the latter
a sleezy, cobwebby, hairy genus of coverlets,
bearing very little resemblance to the stern
but serviceable British Witney —with
windows that never shut properly, and gauzy
curtains that wave to and fro in the draughts
like banshees; with a delightful door, which,
if you happen to shut by accident from
the outside, leaving the key inside, can
never be opened till the locksmith—who
most probably has his logement also
dans l'hotel—is summoned and fee'd to
pick the lock; with never the shadow of a
portmanteau stool; with very seldom even an
apology for a foot-bath; but always with two
gleaming wax-candles in bronze sconces, and
haply, for another franc a-day, a cornice of

* See Times leader, November 3rd, 1855.