By R. HEATH.

Like all the inhabitants of Paris, the workmen dwell in houses of five or six stories high. The ground floor is let out in shops, between which the principal staircase is entered by a narrow passage. At the back there is a small court-yard, skirted on one side by a wing from the main building, of from two to three stories high. Each flat of the main building and of its wing is occupied by several tenants, so that such buildings contain on an average 50 different tenants, with as many as from 120 to 150 inhabitants. In one that I have visited there were 47 tenants, the total number of persons in the building at night being 114.

Workmen inhabit all quarters of Paris, the better sort preferring to live at some distance from their work. The northeast of Paris is, however, peculiarly their quarter; the suburb of St. Antoine and that of St. Martin, with the districts known as La Villette and Belleville, are almost entirely inhabited by workmen, and the tradespeople who supply their wants. The neighborhood of the Canal Saint Martin is altogether a different Paris to that usually seen by the visitor. It has more of the cheerless look of our own manufacturing districts; however, the bright sun of Paris, the rows of trees, and the fountains prevent it from looking gloomy or sad.

In this neighborhood lodging is not so dear as in the older parts of the city. In very miserable and dirty streets in the Latin quarter, the workman has to pay as much as thirty dollars a year for a single room; two rooms cost him fifty-six dollars a year; and two rooms and a little place, which he can use as a kitchen, seventy-two dollars a year. This is enormous, and amounts to about twenty per cent. of his income, supposing him to work full time, and not to belong to one of the more skilled trades.

The question of rent is one of the greatest grievances of which Paris workmen have to complain. It keeps them in poverty and anxiety, and, it is alleged, often drives the whole family to moral ruin; the wife selling her honor to obtain means, and the husband giving himself up in despair to drink.

How impossible it is to settle questions which affect the tenderest feelings of humanity by an assertion of the rights of property, the following story strikingly illustrates:

During the siege of Paris the people universally fell into poverty. On its termination a certain landlord, unable to get his rents, determined to eject all the defaulters. He sent an order to his agent to turn them out and sell their goods. One was a widow with two children. Her husband had died of a cold caught in the trenches. In her grief the poor woman had vowed she would never be married again, and as a sort of testimony of the truth of her intention she had had their walnut bedstead sawn in half. When the time came for the expulsion the proprietor arrived, and seeing the best piece of furniture spoiled, upbraided her with ruining his goods.

She found hospitality elsewhere, but the loss of the old home and the household gods turned her brain. The insurrection of the Commune broke out. She was one of the first to rush to the scene and to join the insurgents. She and her children were seen wherever there was peril. She mounted the barricade, and planted the flag of the Commune in the teeth of the besiegers. In one of the last days of the defence her eldest son was separated from her in the struggle, and the youngest was killed at her feet. Frantic, she seized the body of the child, and springing up a barricade, hurled it upon the bayonets of the soldiers, then tearing open her dress she cried wildly, “Kill me! kill me!” She fell over the stones, but was not dead. “Finish her!” cried the young officer in charge.

A workman’s rooms are generally poorly furnished, but clean; the custom being to spend a disproportionate amount of income on food and clothing.

Living does not seem so costly in Paris as in London, yet it is generally thought dear. Nevertheless the workman can not be said to fare badly.

There are various modes and hours of taking meals in Paris, depending chiefly on the nationality; for it must never be forgotten that Paris is a cosmopolitan city, and contains large numbers of workmen of German, Belgian, and Italian origin.

The French mode is for the workman to leave home fasting, taking his first two meals at a restaurant or cabaret near the place where he is working. The second meal is eaten about ten or eleven o’clock in the morning, and consists of a plate of meat and vegetables and half a bottle of wine. Any one walking about Paris at this hour of the day must have observed workmen seated alone or in groups at the little tables outside the restaurants, eating their breakfast.

The variety offered and the prices may be judged from the following bill of fare, exposed in a street peculiarly frequented by workmen:

The workman’s wife has, with her children, an early meal of milked coffee or soup, the children taking with them to school sandwiches of bread and cheese, or something from the previous day’s dinner. The mother takes a similar breakfast in the middle of the day, the whole family looking forward to the third meal, indiscriminately called dinner or supper, as the principal one of the day. This consists of soup, meat, vegetables or salad, cheese or prunes, and fresh fruit according to the season.

Two or three times a week the kettle is put on, and rich soup and boiled beef obtained. Thin soup is made from the water in which the vegetables have been boiled, or with onions, of which the Paris workman is fond. Wine is generally drunk at supper, but when it is very dear a home-made wine is obtained from raisins, or the wife and children drink water in which liquorice root has been steeped.

Nearly every district in Paris has excellent markets, at which all kinds of meat and poultry, vegetables and dairy produce, can be bought at reasonable prices. There are special days in which it is known certain articles will be fresh and abundant.

In addition to the ordinary butchers’ shops, which in Paris are always peculiarly clean and well arranged, there are special shops for the sale of the flesh of horses, asses, and mules. These shops are called horseflesh shops. There is nothing in the least revolting in their appearance, the joints looking like ordinary meat, only a little darker. It strikes the eye at first as strange to see, “Ass, best quality,” but it is a matter of habit.

The economical wife knows all the various pieces of meat which are nourishing, some of which are little heard of in England, such as beef’s stomach, veal’s mouth, sheep’s foot.

Vegetables are always plentiful in Paris, owing to the quantity of market-garden land round the city, and for the same reason there is a constant supply of salads all the year round, but then the Parisians will make a salad of the leaves of the lamb’s lettuce and the dandelion.

Another help in the domestic economy of the workman’s home is the existence of the co-operative stores for the sale of provisions. In 1870 there were three or four hundred such societies in Paris.

The clothing and linen in a workman’s home are said to equal in value his furniture. His own clothing costs him about $24 a year; washing and mending raising the cost by $12; the clothing of his wife and two children would be about $44 more.

The workman’s wife is extremely industrious, rising early and always assiduously engaged in domestic duties, or in some work by which she adds to the income.

Many workmen with small families are able to save sufficient to set their wives up in business as washerwomen, or in a fruit or newspaper stall. Often she undertakes the duties of a housekeeper, i. e., acting as general servant for the first few hours of the day in some family of the middle class. When she thus works she has to send her children to the crib or to the asylum; but this is not frequent, as the families of workmen in Paris are usually very small.

Those who have the largest are generally of German origin, coming from Alsace, Belgium, and countries bordering on the Rhine. That very large families sometimes are found among workmen in Paris is proved by one case where a day laborer, a native of the department of the Haut-Rhin, received a prize of $600 for bringing up a family of fifteen children respectably on a wage of fifty cents a day. In the end he was assisted by his son, who was able to earn as a skilled workman more than his father.

As a rule the workman leaves the management of the children and the spending of the money entirely to his wife. He gives her all the wages on pay-day, and she doles out to him every morning the sum necessary for his meals.

Sometimes she finds a great deficit when this time comes. Then she weeps and upbraids him, while he, confessing his fault, says reproachfully of himself, “One must not deceive when one has five or six children.”

It does not appear to be easy to outwit a French woman. Occasionally a drinking husband will try to hide a piece of money in some out of the way place, as, for instance, the peak of his hat. But his wife ransacks his clothes while he is asleep and finds the missing coin. This position of affairs being well known, the workman who will not be entrapped into drinking, or who, being one of a social gathering, insists on going home early, is chaffed as a man who buttons up his coat with pins.

It is certainly a fact that feminine influence is very powerful in Paris, and that what the mother is the home becomes. Thus while Paris workmen almost universally absent themselves from the churches, and throw all their influence politically against the priests, their children go in crowds to make their first communion, and to this end are placed under the priests for religious instruction.

To see the street in front of a Paris church on Whit Sunday, no one would believe religion was a matter not only of indifference, but of contempt, to the Paris workman. The road seen from a balcony is like an immense field of snow-drops. Hundreds of white-robed children float about among crowds of smiling parents and friends. And yet there is hardly anything in it beyond a domestic rite, something which it is respectable to go through at a certain age.

“I will sell my clothes, but my child shall not be different from others,” says a mother, who, no more than her husband, considers the spiritual aspect of the ceremony.

The domestic affections of the workman, where he has not been demoralized by licentiousness or vice, are strong, and his sense of duty to his relatives unusual. Thus it would seem not at all uncommon for a workman to support his wife’s mother, even when she lives far away. A workman who had done this for some time fell, through the state of public affairs, into such distress as to be obliged to earn his bread by selling journals in the street. After a time he recovered his position; but all through his period of poverty, the mother-in-law was allowed to believe that no change had taken place in his circumstances. Another workman, who had originally been in business as a butcher, partly ruined himself by undertaking the charge of his wife’s family. However, he never forsook the mother-in-law, but when he had a numerous family and only the small and precarious wages of a day laborer, she remained as much part of his family as the children.

The workman is careful of his children. He will fetch his daughter, apprenticed to dressmaking, from her work in the evening, and likes to have his son follow the same business as himself. He respects his own art, and has no desire to see his boy made into a clerk. If his wife is foolish enough to express such a wish he rates her soundly. “Does she want to make a skip-kennel (errand boy) of him because one gets dirty in factory work?”

“Thou knowest,” he concludes, “I always consider what thou sayest, but candidly, thou art unreasonable—wouldst thou then have him die of hunger when he is grown up? To slave at a desk is a miserable business; one ought to have a manual trade, with that a man always has his living at his fingers’ ends. Why! thou hast never said I was too dirty for thee; ah! I should like to see him a clerk. And to think that there are people who pretend that the woman has as much judgment as the man. Yes, yes, thou art a very good sort of a woman, but at bottom thou knowest nothing. Henri shall be a mechanic; the devil may burn me if ever he becomes a scribbling puppet.”—Good Words.