Retitled 'Some Recollections of Mortality' in collected editions of the series
Georges Haussmann, later Baron, had been appointed prefect of the Seine under Napoleon III in 1853, and was responsible for many of the improvements in the layout and appearance of Paris which Dickens notes in the present item. Dickens had been lodging in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré in the last few months of 1862; letters of 24 October and 4 November comment on the 'vast changes... and the vast works doing and done' in the city, and the way 'the Genius of the Lamp is always building Palaces in the night' (see Pilgrim, Vol. X, p. 149, p. 154). He returned to Paris in the early months of 1863, staying intermittently at the Hôtel du Helder.
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