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“The purpose of these sketches is not political nor yet didactic. No charge is laid upon me to teach the French nation its duties, to reprove it for its follies. Nor yet is it my design to hold up Paris of the Parisians as an example of naughtiness, nor even of virtue, to English readers. A student of human life still in my humanities, my purpose is purely interpretative. I would endeavour to translate into English some Paris scenes, in such a way as to give a true impression of the movement, personages, sounds, colours and atmosphere pervaded with joy of living which belongs to them. These impressions which I have myself received, and now desire to communicate, are not the result of a general survey of Paris taken from some lofty summit. I have not looked down upon the capital of France from the top of the Eiffel Tower; nor yet from the terrace of the Sacré Cœur; nor yet from the balcony among the chimères of Notre Dame; nor yet from Napoleon’s column on the Place Vendôme; nor yet from the Revolution’s monument that celebrates the taking of the Bastille. No doubt from these exalted places the town affords an amazing spectacle. Domes rise in the distance and steeples. Chimneys smoke; clouds hurry. Up there the spectator has not only a fine bird’s-eye view of beautiful Paris: he has a good throne for historical recollections, for philosophical reveries, for the development of political and scientific theories also. But for the student of to-day’s life, whose interest turns less to monuments than to men, there is this drawback—seen from this point of view the inhabitants of Paris look pigmies. Far below him they pass and repass: the bourgeois, the bohemian, the boulevardier, all small, all restless, all active, all so remote that one is not to be distinguished from the other. Coming down from his tower the philosopher may explore Paris from the tombs at St Denis to the crypts of the Panthéon, from the galleries of the Louvre to the shops in the Rue de Rivoli, from the Opera and Odéon to the Moulin Rouge and sham horrors of the cabarets of Montmartre—leaving Paris from the Gare du Nord he may look back at the white city under the blue sky with mingled regret and satisfaction—regret for the instructive days he has spent with her, satisfaction in that he knows her every stone; and yet, when some hours later in mid-Channel the coasts of France grow dim, he may leave behind him an undiscovered Paris—not monumental Paris, not political Paris, not Baedeker’s Paris, not profligate Paris, not fashionable cosmopolitan Paris of the Right Bank, not Bohemian Anglo-American Paris of the Left Bank, but Paris as she knows herself—Paris of the Parisians.