Careful precautions are taken against the Mont-de-Piété being made a receptacle for stolen goods. The applicant for a loan must be known and have a permanent residence, or be vouched for by some one fulfilling these requirements; a married woman must bring the authorization of her husband, and no loans are made to minors. If the employés have any reason to suspect the integrity of the applicant, his loan is refused until he furnishes more satisfactory guarantees. In one year the number of watches recognized as stolen was two hundred and fifty, out of a total of three hundred and fifty thousand received. Loans are made for a year, at the longest, but in practice two months of grace are added; if at the end of this period the object is not redeemed, it is sold at public auction. Some of these pledges have been in the establishment for forty, forty-five, and fifty years, and very many for twenty,--constantly renewed and never redeemed. When sold, the surplus or _boni_ remaining after deducting all charges is held at the disposal of the owner of the pledge for three years, and then turned over to the administration of the Assistance Publique.
By the law of July 25, 1891, this establishment is permitted to advance money, at its usual rates, on French Rentes and other bonds and securities authorized by an ordinance of the Préfet of the Seine. These loans are not to exceed five hundred francs each, nor to be less than three francs, and the duration of the loan is for six months, unless renewed. The capital on which the Mont-de-Piété does business is borrowed from stockholders or subscribers, to whom it pays interest; one of the principal of these is the Comédie-Française, which, by the famous decree of Moscow, is required to place two millions of its surplus in this official benevolent institution.
Much the most important public service of Paris is the Bureau of _Postes et Télégraphes_, the administration of which is confided to a Sous-Secrétaire d'État, and which employs, altogether, nearly thirteen thousand _fonctionnaires_, male and female. Of the efficiency of the postal service, the Parisians are justly proud; the telephone service, on the contrary, since it has passed under the management of the government, is a source of more earnest and heated complaint on the part of the unfortunate subscribers than even is usual in other lands before this aggravating mouthpiece and tube. The earliest postal service in France, according to the historians, was maintained by the Université for the benefit of its students, who were enabled to correspond with their relatives by means of messengers; this exclusive privilege, long preserved, was finally combined with the service which Louis XI established to serve the ends of his crooked policy. The modern postal service may be said to date from the reign of Louis XIII; and, in its gradual development, has passed through much the same phases as in other countries. During the seventeenth century, the central office was located in some contracted quarters established in front of the colonnade of the Louvre, and was eventually transferred to the old hôtel in the Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, constructed on the site of the ancient Hôtel de Flandres. Although enlarged by successive additions, this building never afforded sufficient facilities, and proposals to abandon it and construct another and more ample central office elsewhere were seriously debated from 1793 to 1811, but the Corps Législatif was unwilling to incur so great an expense. On the night of the 7th-8th of August, 1880, the central office for Paris and the department of the Seine was established in temporary quarters in the Place Carrousel, and the demolition of the ancient building, preparatory to the construction on its site of a much larger and more efficient one, was commenced. The new Hôtel des Postes et Télégraphes was completed four years later.