In such places as these, haunted by ignorant poverty
and misery driven to bay, flourish the last public letter-writers who
are to be found in Paris. Wherever you see the two words "Ecrivain
Public" written in a fine copy hand on a sheet of letter-paper stuck
to the window pane of some low entresol or mud-splashed ground-floor
room, you may safely conclude that the neighborhood is the lurking
place of many unlettered folks, and of much vice and crime, the
outcome of misery; for ignorance is the mother of all sorts of crime.
A crime is, in the first instance, a defect of reasoning powers.
While the Baroness had been ill, this quarter, to which she was a
minor Providence, had seen the advent of a public writer who settled
in the Passage du Soleil--Sun Alley--a spot of which the name is one
of the antitheses dear to the Parisian, for the passage is especially
dark. This writer, supposed to be a German, was named Vyder, and he
lived on matrimonial terms with a young creature of whom he was so
jealous that he never allowed her to go anywhere excepting to some
honest stove and flue-fitters, in the Rue Saint-Lazare, Italians, as
such fitters always are, but long since established in Paris. These
people had been saved from a bankruptcy, which would have reduced them
to misery, by the Baroness, acting in behalf of Madame de la
Chanterie.
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