M. Sarcey we may meet M. Charles Monselet, dramatic critic to Evénement, and very busy at this juncture trying to set up a new jointstock theatre at the Porte-Montmartre. He, too, is plump, and wears spectacles, and the chances are that he will have on his arm a very popular young writer with crisp hair and a mahogany face-M. Victor Cochinat, of the Rappel, who hails from Guadeloupe. But M. Monselet is one of the princes of the French press, and his walks down the Boulevards are generally a triumphal series of hat-liftings and hand-shakings till he comes finally to anchor in a snug corner of the Café de Suède, cheek-by-jowl with a gentleman resplendent in a velvet waistcoat, a red tie, and too much watch-chain. Who that has ever been in Paris will not recognise, at the mere sight of this exuberant jewellery, M. Léo Lespès, known to, and beloved by, every concierge, market woman, and laundress in Paris as "Timothée Trimm"? M. Trimm served his seven years in the army, and never rose above sergeantship; neither did his career dawn very brightly after he recurred to civilian life, for he had no friends, no money, no profession, and, as he pathetically said, "no clear ideas as to anything in general." All this, however, was baggage enough for a literary man ; and one day M. Lespès, meeting the Israelite capitalist M. Millaud, suggested to him the creation of a one-sou daily paper. M. Millaud thought the idea good, and, as his custom was, acted on it without delay. The Petit Journal was started, and in less than a twelvemonth rose to a circulation of 150,000, and by the end of two years' time to 250,000. For five consecutive years, without a single day's interruption, M. Léo Lespès contributed to this sheet a daily chronique of three columns' length; and when at last he retired from the Petit Journal to the Petit Moniteur, it was only to continue this extraordinary kind of labour at an increased salary. The Petit Journal had given him 2,000l. a year, the Petit Moniteur offered him 3,000l., and Timothée Trimm draws this salary to the present day, and does his best to deserve it by instructive chroniques, compiled largely out of biographical dictionaries, memoirs, and books of travel, and yet very readable. M. Léo Lespès considers that he has done much to educate the masses, and perhaps he has; at all events, it must be recorded to his honour that he is a singularly impartial writer, and that he appears to be utterly unconscious of the political changes that go on around him. He never alludes to them even remotely; and no man knows what his political opinions are. If you question him on this subject, he answers, with a wink, "I believe in Paris, and nothing else; and to tell the truth, I have not travelled farther than ten miles outside Paris for the last twelve years." Then he lights a cigarette, and strokes one of the most over-waxed pair of moustaches human eye ever beheld.

But Parisian journalists are so numerous, and space is so limited, that a whole bevy of well-known faces must be left unsketched, though they come crowding up, and seem to protest, French-like, against being left unnoticed. One at least of the number must be alluded to, for he is the most conspicuous of all-namely, M. de Hippolyte de Villemessant,

proprietor and editor of the Figaro. Short and round, with a very French head of bullet shape, a drooping, dyed moustache, and an irrepressible white waistcoat, M. de Villemessant holds veritable levees in every public spot where his countrymen congregate. He has a way of nodding and of holding out his hand, which seems to say that he knows his great importance, and would like to keep up the dignity of it if he could; but unfortunately he cannot. When he first started his Figaro he never counted on its becoming an important political oracle, selling 50,000 copies a day, and guiding the opinions of all the lighter classes of the French capital. Now that he finds himself a courted personage, to whom even Deputies and Cabinet Ministers think it prudent to bow, he is rather struck by the humour of the thing, and will confess the fact in private if he thinks you can be relied on. It is needless to say that M. de Villemessant's highsounding name is an assumed one, his real patronymic being Cartier; also that, like the generality of French literary folk, he began in life with no capital but his own wits. His mode of rising was, however, extremely simple once he had scraped enough credit and money together to found a paper. Unlike other editors who have an opinion and lay it down as a guide to their contributors, M. de Villemessant kept his opinions to himself, and allowed the writers on his staff to say what they pleased. As he enlisted the most pushing, witty, and reckless journalists that love or money could procure, the concert of discordant sounds which his newspaper emitted was something altogether new in journalism, and like most new things, it paid well. Another principle of M. de Villemessant's has always been to dish up the commonest scraps of news in the most attractive form-strict adherence to facts being a secondary consideration-and the result is, that when a mad dog is killed in the Figaro's columns, he always dies more artistically and under more interesting circumstances than in prints of the old school. This way of doing business M. de Villemessant calls "true journalism," and he does not conceal his contempt for newssheets which, like those of England, describe things "drily and barely,' as they have happened.

"GOOD AFTERNOON, MISS BRANDT-AND YOU, MY DEAR SIR."

M

R. BRANDT'S last seizure had a singular, but not unheard
of, effect upon him. At the end of a few days, during which
Claudia underwent more cruel fatigues and harder toil than
Zelda had ever known in all her wanderings, his torpor began

to clear away, and he regained consciousness, although not the use of his limbs. His mind, too, was enfeebled, though not to the point of imbecility. Remembering all his misfortunes clearly, they ceased to trouble him actively: he seemed to take a child-like pleasure in the mere fact of existence, and from having been one of the