of this corner of Paris, and covering the waste ground lying between the Rue d’Amsterdam and the Rue Faubourg-du-Roule, will no doubt alter the character of the inhabitants; for the trowel is a more civilizing agent than is generally supposed.  By erecting substantial and handsome houses, with porters at the doors, by bordering the streets with footwalks and shops, speculation, while raising the rents, disperses the squalid class, families bereft of furniture, and lodgers that cannot pay.  And so these districts are cleared of such objectionable residents, and the dens vanish into which the police never venture but under the sanction of the law.

In June 1844, the purlieus of the Place de Laborde were still far from inviting.  The genteel pedestrian, who by chance should turn out of the Rue de la Pepiniere into one of those dreadful side-streets, would have been dismayed to see how vile a bohemia dwelt cheek by jowl with the aristocracy.  In such places as these, haunted by ignorant poverty and misery driven to bay, flourish the last public letter-writers who are to be found in Paris.  Wherever you see the two words “Ecrivain Public” written in a fine copy hand on a sheet of letter-paper stuck to the window pane of some low entresol or mud-splashed ground-floor room, you may safely conclude that the neighborhood is the lurking place of many unlettered folks, and of much vice and crime, the outcome of misery; for ignorance is the mother of all sorts of crime.  A crime is, in the first instance, a defect of reasoning powers.

While the Baroness had been ill, this quarter, to which she was a minor Providence, had seen the advent of a public writer who settled in the Passage du Soleil—­Sun Alley—­a spot of which the name is one of the antitheses dear to the Parisian, for the passage is especially dark.  This writer, supposed to be a German, was named Vyder, and he lived on matrimonial terms with a young creature of whom he was so jealous that he never allowed her to go anywhere excepting to some honest stove and flue-fitters, in the Rue Saint-Lazare, Italians, as such fitters always are, but long since established in Paris.  These people had been saved from a bankruptcy, which would have reduced them to misery, by the Baroness, acting in behalf of Madame de la Chanterie.  In a few months comfort had taken the place of poverty, and Religion had found a home in hearts which once had cursed Heaven with the energy peculiar to Italian stove-fitters.  So one of Madame Hulot’s first visits was to this family.

She was pleased at the scene that presented itself to her eyes at the back of the house where these worthy folks lived in the Rue Saint-Lazare, not far from the Rue du Rocher.  High above the stores and workshops, now well filled, where toiled a swarm of apprentices and workmen—­all Italians from the valley of Domo d’Ossola—­the master’s family occupied a set of rooms, which hard work had blessed with abundance.  The Baroness was hailed like the Virgin Mary in person.