soon as a certain state of hilarity, or a certain seriousness of conversation, becomes visible. An observer sees in this little fact alone a distinction which must affect the laws, the morality, the crimes, and the amusements of a whole population. He sees at once that the one sex is not a free participator in the plans and the projects, and the pleasures of the other. He sees at once how this fact extends itself over our society and our statute-book, our prisons and our public houses; and many of the differences that he finds between the French and the English-differences sometimes to the advantage of one people, sometimes to the advantage of the other—he is prepared to account for by the different relations that exist in France and in England between the two sexes. Let it be crime or pleasure-conspiracy, assassination, or debauch-whatever takes place in France, be sure that the influence of woman has been felt upon it, that the passions of woman have been mingled up with it ;* for the same feelings and the same energies which make us capable of great things, propel us on to bad; and if we wish to find the most innocent, I fear we must seek for them, as in Paraguay, among the weakest of mankind.

* Vidocq's Memoirs abound in proofs of this.

There is a remarkable female phenomenon in France, which contrasts itself with what occurs in almost every other country. In England, it is a melancholy fact, that many of the miserable creatures who at midnight parade the streets, and whose only joy is purchased for a penny at Mr. Thomson's gin-shop, have fallen, perchance, but a few months since, from situations of comfort, honesty, and respectability. In France, the woman who begins with the most disgusting occupation on the Boulevards, usually contrives, year after year, to ascend one step after another into a more creditable position.* The

* A great many of the furnished hotels in Paris are kept by women of this description; some of these hotels belong to them-for whenever they have money sufficient, they always invest it in property of this description.

The commonest of Madame Leroi's little apprentices has an air, and a manner, and a tone, that approach her to good society a mind of natural distinction, which elevates her at once above the artificial lessons of good breeding, and makes her, grammar and orthography excepted, just what you find the fine lady:you see that the clay of which both are made is of equal fineness; and that it is only by an accident that the one has been moulded into a marquise—the other into a milliner. There is hardly an example of a French woman, suddenly elevated, who has not taken, as it were by instinct, the manners belonging to her new situation. Madame du Barry was as remarkable for her elegance as the Duchesse de Berri.

hope and the desire to rise never forsake her; notwithstanding her vanity and her desire for dress, and her passion for pleasure, she husbands her unhappy earnings. There is a kind of virtue and order mingling with the extravagance and vice which form part of her profession. The aged mother, or the little sister, is never forgotten. She has not that first horror of depravity which is found amongst our chaster females; but she falls not at once, nor does she ever fall lower than necessity obliges her. Without education, she contrives to pick up a certain train of thought, a finesse, and a justness of ideas—a thorough knowledge of life and of character-and, what, perhaps, is most surprising of all, a tact, a delicacy, and elegance of manners, which it is perfectly marvellous that she should have preserved-much more that she should have collected from the wretchedness and filth which her life has been dragged through. In the lowest state of infamy and misery, she cherishes and displays feelings you would have thought incompatible with such a state; and as one has wept over the virtues and the frailties of the dear and the beautiful, and imaginary Manon l'Escaut, so there are real heroines in Vidocq, whom our sympathy and our affection accompany to the galleys.

The laws

Such are the women of France! and habits of a constitutional government will in a certain degree affect their character; will in a certain degree diminish their influence; but that character is too long confirmed, that influence is too widely spread, for the legislation which affects them on the one hand, not to be affected by them on the other-and it would take a revolution more terrible than any we have yet seen, to keep the Deputy at the Chamber after six o'clock in the evening, and to bring his wife to the conviction that she was not a fit companion for him after dinner. Still, undoubtedly there has been a change, not as much in the habits of domestic, as in the habits. of political life; and though the husband and the lover are still under feminine sway, the state is at all events comparatively free from female caprice. Is it on account of the power they possess, or because that power appears rather on the decline, that the more sturdy heroines of the day have raised the old standard of the immortal Jeanne, and with the famous device

"Notre bannière étant au péril, il faut qu'elle soit à l'honneur,"* march to what they call the deliverance of female kind?

I was present in the Rue Taranne at one of * Motto of Jeanne d'Arc.

the weekly meetings which take place among these high-spirited ladies, and I own that as I cast my eye round the room upon the unprepossessing countenances of the feminine apostles who preached the new doctrine of masculine obedience, I could at all events perfectly conceive that there were some conditions between the sexes which they would naturally desire to see altered.

An old gentleman, a member of the 'Institut,' and decorated with a red ribbon an old gentleman, a very kind and amiable, but debilelooking old gentleman, was raising a tremulous and affrighted voice, in the vain endeavour to calm the eloquent passions of his agitated audience, who, after having commenced, in an orderly manner enough, by most timidly reading three or four cold and learned discourses, were now extemporising a confusion of clamours and contradictions, which justified, in some sort, their pretensions to a seat in their national assembly.

These most independent dames could no longer, it appeared, support the idea of being presided over by anything that approached, even as much as the unhappy old academician, to the form and propensities of a man. And the question they called upon him to propose was-his