Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/224

240 beholder, and made him both laugh and cry at the same time.

That Paris of 1821 and 1822, I no longer recognized in the Paris of 1856. There were no beggars on the boulevards, no miserable, but at the same time no splendid display. There were few outcries and no laughter. The Palais Royal was dark. The police had interdicted gambling-houses, and taken the night-butterflies in hand. The new Emperor drove rapidly through the silent empty streets; but nobody took any notice of him, and he seemed to take notice of no one. His cheek exhibited more appearance of health and youthful vigor than I had expected to see; his profile may be called handsome; his eyes are disagreeable, dark, expressionless, without any glance—it may be said; in fact I did not see them.

In the Tuileries children still played amongst the heaps of withered leaves, which the wind of October whirled around. The theatres were closed, or had no longer any stars. Rachel was dying or dead. Parisian life appeared to me as if dead. Some inferior “Café Chantant,” where there was singing without any regard to voice, alone assembled in the evening the promenaders of the boulevards.

I missed the melo-dramatic life of the former Paris, and I mistrusted the calm which the present exhibited. It was in itself a good thing that a strict police compelled the discontinuance of any public display of its moral and physical wretchedness. But were they decreased by that means? Improvements had unquestionably taken place in the appearance and buildings of the city, but, as it appeared to me, in a way