New Year's Day is a French one, and a bitter,
bitter cold one. All Paris is out of doors.
Along the line of the Boulevards runs a
double row of stalls, like the stalls at an
English fair; and surely those are hard to
please, in all small wares and all small
gambling, who cannot be pleased here. Paris
is out of doors in its newest and brightest
clothes. Paris is making presents to the
Universe—which is well known to be Paris.
Paris will eat more bon-bons this day, than
in the whole bon-bon eating year. Paris will
dine out this day, more than ever. In
this homage to the day, the peculiar glory of the
always-glorious plate-glass windows of the
Restorers in the Palais Royal, where rare
summer-vegetables from Algiers contend
with wonderful great pears from the richest
soils of France, and with little plump birds
of exquisite plumage, direct from the skies.
In homage to the day, the glittering
brilliancy of the sweet-shops, teeming with
beautiful arrangement of colours, and with
beautiful tact and taste in trifles. In homage to
the day, the new Review—Dramas at the
Theatre of Varieties, and the Theatre of
Vaudevilles, and the Theatre of the Palais
Royal. In homage to the day, the new Drama
in seven acts, and incalculable pictures, at the
Ambiguously Comic Theatre, the Theatre of
the Gate of Saint Martin, and the Theatre of
Gaiety: at which last establishment particularly,
a brooding Englishman can, by intensity
of interest, get himself made wretched for a
fortnight. In homage to the day, the
extra-announcing of these Theatres, and fifty more,
and the queues of blouses already, at three
o'clock in the afternoon, penned up in the
cold wind on the cold stone pavement outside
them. Spite of wind and frost, the Elysian
Fields and the Wood of Boulogne are filled
with equipages, equestrians, and pedestrians:
while the strange, rackety, rickety, up-all-night
looking world of eating house, tombstone
maker, ball room, cemetery, and wine-shop,
outside the Barriers, is as thickly-peopled
as the Paris streets themselves;
with one universal tendency observable in
both hemispheres, to sit down upon any public
seat at a risk of being frozen to death, and to
go round and round on a hobby-horse in any
roundabout, to the music of a barrel organ, as
a severe act of duty. And now, this New
Year's Day tones down into night, and the
brilliantly lighted city shines out like the
gardens of the Wonderful Lamp, and the
penned blouses flutter into the Theatres in
orderly line, and the confidential men, not
unaccustomed to lean on umbrellas as they
survey mankind of an afternoon, who have
tickets to sell cheap, are very busy among
them, and the women money-takers shut up in
strong iron-cages are busy too, and the three
men all of a row behind a breast-work who
take the checks are busy too, and the women
box-openers  with their footstools begin to be
busy too, but as yet not very, and the curtain
goes up for the curtain-rising piece, and the
gloomy young gentleman with the tight black
head and the new black moustache is as much
in love as ever with the young lady whose
eyebrows are very arched and whose voice is
very thin, and the gloomy young gentleman's
experienced friend (generally chewing
something, by the bye, and I wonder what), who
leans his back against the chimney-piece and
reads him lessons of life, is just as cool
as he always was, and an amazing
circumstance to me is, that they are always doing
thing and no other thing, and that I don't
find them to have any place in the great
event of the evening, and that I want to
know whether they go home when they have
done it, or what becomes of them. Meanwhile,
gushes of cookery rise with the night air
from the Restorer's kitchens; and the guests
at the Cafe of Paris, and the Café of the Three
Provincial Brothers, and the Café Vefour,
and the Café Verey, and the Gilded House,
and others of first class, are reflected in
wildernesses of looking glass, and sit on red
velvet and order dinner out of red velvet
books; while the citizens at the Cafe
Champeaux near the Bourse, and others of second
class, sit on rush-bottomed chairs, and have
their dinner-library bound in plain leather,
though they dine well too; while both kinds
of company have plenty of children with
them (which is pleasant to me, though I
think they begin life biliously), and both
unite in eating everything that is set before
them. But, now it is eight o'clock upon this
New Year's evening. The new Dramas being
about to begin, bells ring violently in the
Theatre lobbies and rooms, and cigars,
coffee cups, and small glasses are hastily
abandoned, and I find myself assisting at
one of the Review-pieces: where I notice
that the English gentleman's stomach isn't
very like, because it doesn't fit him, and
wherein I doubt the accurate nationality of
the English lady's walking on her toes with
an upward jerk behind. The Review is derived
from various times and sources, and when I
have seen David the Psalmist in his droll scene
with Mahomet and Abd-el-Kader, and have
heard the best joke and best song that Eve (a
charming young lady, but liable, I should fear,
to take cold) has in her part (which occurs in
her scene with the Sieur Framboisie), I
think I will step out to the Theatre of Gaiety, and
see what they are about there. I am so fortunate
as to arrive in the nick of time to find the
very estimable man just eloped with the wife of
the much less estimable man whom Destiny
has made a bore, and to find her honest
father just arriving from the country by one
door, encountering the father of the very
estimable man just arriving from the country
by another door, and to hear them launch
cross—curses her father at him: his father at
her—which so deeply affects a martial gentleman
of tall stature and dark complexion,
in the next stall to mine, that, taking his