3-028-694 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Modern aspects of Paris: the Palais de Justice, 1870. '...the Salle des Pas-Perdus has...become transformed into a kind of lounging-place for members of the legal profession and their clients - a mere ante-chamber to the courts of justice. It is always thronged,...crowded with barristers, attorneys, registrars, and reporters...there is always a large number of Government employés who have come to take the necessary oaths before the First Chamber...Presently an usher announces, "Le Tribunal, Messieurs, chapeau bas;" and immediately a crowd of barristers rush wildly into the various courts, in haste not to miss their cases...clerks, with formidable bundles of paper under their arms, dash hither and thither; clients are running about looking for their counsel, who, on the other hand, are searching for them...There is probably no public place in Paris where one finds assembled every day so many celebrities as in the Salle des Pas-Perdus...; for the Parisian Bar is at once the cradle and the refuge of French public men. The Ministers of the past here walk arm-in-arm with the Ministers of the future; while deputies of the Corps Législatif, savants, journalists, and functionaries of every rank help to swell the crowd of loungers'. From "Illustrated London News", 1870.