In the Boulevard Beaumarchais, close by the old Place of the Bastile, stands the grandest of the theatres habitually visited by the blousard.  Its most constant patrons are the furniture-makers of the Faubourg St. Antoine, who bring to the theatre a decided perfume of mahogany and rosewood, and suggest the varnish of newness which the place would otherwise sadly lack.  The quarter in which it stands is not a specially suspicious one by day, but at night it is ill calculated to inspire confidence.  There are villainous-looking, slouching wretches about, who eye you curiously and not too amiably.  The theatre has had its day of splendor, but is now a frowzy-looking concern—­very roomy, somewhat suggesting the Old Bowery Theatre, but lacking its cheerful aspect.  The audience is without exception of the blousard class:  the patrons of the Old Bowery, even in its latest years, were almost millionaires in comparison.  The highest-priced seats (excepting the proscenium-boxes, which are never occupied) cost forty sous.  You can sit in the gallery for five sous if you like the company of the Paris gamin.  At the entrance of the theatre there is a placard which reads thus:  “By paying twenty-five centimes one enters immediately without making queue.”  The ticket-seller is a prosperous-looking old woman of fifty or there-about, who wears a beribboned cap and side-curls, and has a mouth which tells of years spent in the authoritative position she occupies.  She is stern to a terrible degree with the average blousard who approaches the round hole whereat she reigns; but to us, who indulge in the extravagance of paying the extra five sous for the privilege of entering without taking our place in the queue at the door, she relaxes visibly.

The curtain rises at seven o’clock, here as at all the theatres where the blousard pays his money, and the amusement continues until after midnight.  But it is not amusing.  There are several pieces on the bill, but’ the chief one, a drama in five acts, is a poor thing, played by mediocre actors in the most dismal manner possible.  The scenery is worn and dilapidated and wretched; the play turns on the sufferings of the poor; there are two or three murders, a suicide, a death from starvation, and such a glut of horrors that the whole entertertainment is dismal and depressing to the last degree.  Yet the theatre is usually well patronized, and the audience seems intensely interested.  The blousard loves to see depicted on the stage a degree of misery more terrible than that which is his daily lot.  For the dramas which depict high life—­unless it be the high life of the old days of beruffled and silk-stockinged cavaliers—­he cares very little.  And in his serious modern dramas the hero must be a blousard, the villain a fine gentleman, the blousard to marry the heroine in the last act, and the fine gentleman to be sent to the galleys.

WIRT SIKES.

EIGHT HUNDRED MILES IN AN AMBULANCE.