ride in the leafy avenues of Versailles! The next morning found miles

and miles of grassy avenues spread thick with snowy salt and sugar, and a

procession of those quaint sleighs waiting to receive the chief concubine

of the gaiest and most unprincipled court that France has ever seen!

From sumptuous Versailles, with its palaces, its statues, its gardens,

and its fountains, we journeyed back to Paris and sought its antipodes

--the Faubourg St. Antoine. Little, narrow streets; dirty children

blockading them; greasy, slovenly women capturing and spanking them;

filthy dens on first floors, with rag stores in them (the heaviest

business in the Faubourg is the chiffonier's); other filthy dens where

whole suits of second and third-hand clothing are sold at prices that

would ruin any proprietor who did not steal his stock; still other filthy

dens where they sold groceries--sold them by the half-pennyworth--five

dollars would buy the man out, goodwill and all. Up these little crooked

streets they will murder a man for seven dollars and dump the body in the

Seine. And up some other of these streets--most of them, I should say

--live lorettes.

All through this Faubourg St. Antoine, misery, poverty, vice, and crime

go hand in hand, and the evidences of it stare one in the face from every

side. Here the people live who begin the revolutions. Whenever there is

anything of that kind to be done, they are always ready. They take as

much genuine pleasure in building a barricade as they do in cutting a

throat or shoving a friend into the Seine. It is these savage-looking

ruffians who storm the splendid halls of the Tuileries occasionally, and

177

The Innocents Abroad