When I resumed my night rambles through the Paris slums in company with the two detectives, the elder one suggested that we should commence the evening by visiting the Italian colony in the Rue de St. Victor. We accordingly drove there at once, and alighted at a house immediately opposite the back of the Halle aux Vins. The entrance to this place was through a most respectable looking porte-cochère leading to a large courtyard, where no fewer than seventy chambers were let out almost exclusively to Italians, six to eight of whom occupied a single small room, and paid in advance five francs per head per month for this miserable accommodation. When the room was furnished with straw mattresses on the floor, the charge for each occupant was six sous a night. The rate was the same for young children as for grown-up people. We were informed that the proprietor of this establishment had accumulated a large fortune by letting lodgings at this rate, as his rooms were nearly always full.

The herd of people from all parts of Italy congregated in this and two neighbouring establishments was upwards of six hundred in number; and how does the reader suppose they got their living? Not by work in the ordinary acceptation of the term ; not by strolling about the streets beating tambourines or blowing bagpipes and begging sous of unsympathetic passers-by—only a fraction of them lived by these means.