reputation as a virtuous woman. If, by chance, she is there at nine in
the evening the conjectures that an observer permits himself to make
upon her may prove fearful in their consequences. But if the woman is
young and pretty, if she enters a house in one of those streets, if
the house has a long, dark, damp, and evil-smelling passage-way, at
the end of which flickers the pallid gleam of an oil lamp, and if
beneath that gleam appears the horrid face of a withered old woman
with fleshless fingers, ah, then! and we say it in the interests of
young and pretty women, that woman is lost. She is at the mercy of the
first man of her acquaintance who sees her in that Parisian slough.
There is more than one street in Paris where such a meeting may lead
to a frightful drama, a bloody drama of death and love, a drama of the
modern school.

Unhappily, this scene, this modern drama itself, will be comprehended
by only a small number of persons; and it is a pity to tell the tale
to a public which cannot enter into its local merit. But who can
flatter himself that he will ever be understood? We all die unknown
--'tis the saying of women and of authors.

At half-past eight o'clock one evening, in the rue Pagevin, in the
days when that street had no wall which did not echo some infamous
word, and was, in the direction of the rue Soly, the narrowest and
most impassable street in Paris (not excepting the least frequented
corner of the most deserted street),--at the beginning of the month of
February about thirteen years ago, a young man, by one of those
chances which come but once in life, turned the corner of the rue
Pagevin to enter the rue des Vieux-Augustins, close to the rue Soly.
There, this young man, who lived himself in the rue de Bourbon, saw in
a woman near whom he had been unconsciously walking, a vague