Among the many noble associations founded in Paris by Catholic charity, there is one, originated by Madame de la Chanterie, for promoting civil and religious marriages between persons who have formed a voluntary but illicit union.  Legislators, who draw large revenues from the registration fees, and the Bourgeois dynasty, which benefits by the notary’s profits, affect to overlook the fact that three-fourths of the poorer class cannot afford fifteen francs for the marriage-contract.  The pleaders, a sufficiently vilified body, gratuitously defend the cases of the indigent, while the notaries have not as yet agreed to charge nothing for the marriage-contract of the poor.  As to the revenue collectors, the whole machinery of Government would have to be dislocated to induce the authorities to relax their demands.  The registrar’s office is deaf and dumb.

Then the Church, too, receives a duty on marriages.  In France the Church depends largely on such revenues; even in the House of God it traffics in chairs and kneeling stools in a way that offends foreigners; though it cannot have forgotten the anger of the Saviour who drove the money-changers out of the Temple.  If the Church is so loath to relinquish its dues, it must be supposed that these dues, known as Vestry dues, are one of its sources of maintenance, and then the fault of the Church is the fault of the State.

The co-operation of these conditions, at a time when charity is too greatly concerned with the negroes and the petty offenders discharged from prison to trouble itself about honest folks in difficulties, results in the existence of a number of decent couples who have never been legally married for lack of thirty francs, the lowest figure for which the Notary, the Registrar, the Mayor and the Church will unite two citizens of Paris.  Madame de la Chanterie’s fund, founded to restore poor households to their religious and legal status, hunts up such couples, and with all the more success because it helps them in their poverty before attacking their unlawful union.

As soon as Madame Hulot had recovered, she returned to her occupations.  And then it was that the admirable Madame de la Chanterie came to beg that Adeline would add the legalization of these voluntary unions to the other good works of which she was the instrument.

One of the Baroness’ first efforts in this cause was made in the ominous-looking district, formerly known as la Petite Pologne—­Little Poland—­bounded by the Rue du Rocher, Rue de la Pepiniere, and Rue de Miromenil.  There exists there a sort of offshoot of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau.  To give an idea of this part of the town, it is enough to say that the landlords of some of the houses tenanted by working men without work, by dangerous characters, and by the very poor employed in unhealthy toil, dare not demand their rents, and can find no bailiffs bold enough to evict insolvent lodgers.  At the present time speculating builders, who are fast changing the aspect