Orientals who visit Paris for the first time are at a loss to conceive anything more magnificent than its streets and its palaces and gardens. After having been in England, however, their opinion is materially altered, though I must still admit that there are some striking features in Paris; amongst these, the Boulevards, Champs Elysées, Tuileries, the Louvre and Luxembourg, are the most attractive. Of the greater part of the streets of Paris I can say but little; and there are some so filthy, narrow, and almost impassable, as to outstrip the meanest town in Turkey. Nothing but the uncouth wooden _sabots_ of the French could at any season traverse them. Though I must acknowledge that nothing can surpass the easy elegance and refinement of the higher classes of society, it would appear, from what a poor countryman of mine told me, that the second-rate lodging houses are miserable in the extreme. One would imagine, from his description, that they went to the opposite extreme to luxury. Complaining bitterly of his fate, for he had all his life before been accustomed to opulent independence in Lebanon, he wrote to me the other day as follows, viz.:—
“The disagreeable first-impression made upon my mind on first taking possession of my lodgings here (Paris), was the melancholy resemblance existing between my chimney-place and a Syrian church-yard, for I can assure you that its shape resembles exactly one of our ordinary tombstones. For the first few nights I hardly dared look at it before going to bed, lest I should have my rest broken by dreams of spectres and other horrid sprites of the imagination. In addition to its disagreeable appearance, it smokes so terribly that I dare not light a fire, though shivering with cold, lest I should lose my eyesight from the effects of the smoke; but this is not all; the door will not shut well, the floorings are of damp bricks, and the rooms are built without respect to proportion, elegance, or comfort. The house I am living in is eight stories high, and heigho! poor me, I live on the fourth floor, so that I have a hundred steps to mount up and down a dozen times a-day. The greatest nuisance of all is, that the street door is continually being left open, so that any one given to pilfering is at perfect liberty to walk up and down stairs and help himself to whatever the fates may throw in his way. There certainly is nominally a _concierge_. This old worthy, however, is either so engrossed with an old newspaper or so comfortably napping, that he is perfectly unconscious of all passing around him.