Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 144, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 June 1913 — To Pull Down Prison. [ARTICLE]

To Pull Down Prison.

The prison of St. Lazare is going to be pulled down and rebuilt, and with it will disappear a curious little relic of old Paris, a tiny shop in which the last public letter writer in France plied his trade. In olden times, before education had become general, the public letter writer did a thriving trade and the one just outside St Lazare had Tnany customers of note. Among them was, if rumor and the present proprietor of the little shop may be believed, the world famous Manon Lascaut, who dictated her love letters to Des Grieux there, where the only customers now are illiterate servant girls, who write home to their friends In Brittany. So rare has the necessity for vicarious letter writing become that the present proprietor of the place has added another more profitable trade to his program and acts as an informal lawyer and man of business to many of the prisoners In St. Lazare.—Paris correspondence London Standard.