even with all the legs belonging to the afore-mentioned heads. He has refused the ten thousand ducats which were offered to him by the Montenegrin Parliament as a civil list; he would not accept more than half, and he added, the monster,-If it should prove that even diminished by one half, this sum is too heavy, I will propose a further reduction.' Must a man be a Montenegrin to express such ridiculous ideas? If he had only passed a few years on French soil, this is what he would have said:Montenegrins! the sum you have offered me is in reality too great. I accept it only on one condition: that it is doubled."

6

Another class of Government officials of whom he has something to say not calculated to give them satisfaction, is the Inspectorsgeneral, whose duty it is to preside at the different agricultural shows held in the departments :—

"Among the many comical sinecures inscribed on the budget, I don't know one more so than that of Inspector-general of Agricultural Exhibitions. A personage, whose name escapes me, receives twenty thousand franes a year to eat pâtés de foie gras, and see displays of fireworks. It is true that along with his foie gras he has to swallow so much intolerable talk, that, all things considered, I am disposed to recommend that his salary shall be raised to twenty-five thousand francs a year, with the privilege of stuffing his ears with cotton.

66

"I don't know of anything more amusing than these sham fêtes of nature. Functionaries in black dress-coats, who, in matters agricultural, are not, to speak metaphorically, capable of distinguishing between a green haricot and an elephant, are placed in juxtaposition with threshing machines and steam ploughs. The black dress-coat congratulates the maker on his threshing machine or his plough; a dinner for seventy-two is served, to which is invariably invited an honest farmer to enliven the guests by the simplicity of his remarks, and his astonishment when he drinks champagne that seems to be boiling, and which he finds to be nearly as cold as ice.'

An anonymous writer sent him a letter charging him with a systematic opposition to the Government for a purpose it was not difficult to divine. To this he replies, after some satirical remarks on the writer :

"My opposition is systematic, I know; but one must be just, the admiration of the Constitutionnel is not less so. But as long as several of our dignitaries continue systematically to pocket from two hundred and fifty thousand to three hundred thousand francs a year-so long as M. Rouher continues systematically to maintain that the Mexican expedition was the grandest thought of the reign (not of Maximilian's reign, of course)-so long as things go on systematically bad, I shall continue to repeat that they don't go well. . . There is one condition, however, on which I will abandon my systematic opposition, out of gratitude to a reader who has so systematically perused my productions, and that is when M. Dreolle, of the Patrie, abandoning his systematic flattery, shall declare in an article of at least two columns in length, that the Government spends too much money, and that the system of official candidates is particularly detestable."

To the frequency of his attacks on individuals may be ascribed the bitter hostility he excited. Thus, speaking of another man who had in some way roused his ire, after referring to the descent of the tongues of fire on the heads of the apostles, which gave them the power of speaking in all languages, he continues:

66

Eighteen centuries and a half later Father Grétry, their successor, took his seat in one of the chairs of the Academy. Ever since then I have doubted the truth of this miracle, seeing that a thirteenth has not descended on his head to enable him to speak his own."

The number of La Lanterne from which we have taken the preceding extracts was seized in the Kiosks, and M. Rochefort, very naturally, wants to know the motive for such a puerile proceeding :

"I have been told," he says, "that the worst of my crimes was having slightly scratched, in my last number, the antiquity of M. de Maupas' nobility, and the no less ancient nobility of M. de Persigny. The ambition of these two representatives of the French aristocracy is, it seems, to march abreast of the Trémouilles and the Rohan Chabots. It is not in my power to abate their pretensions, but I have a perfect right to point them out. If I have said that which is not true, in relating that M. de Persigny had been maltreated in the Chamber of Peers in the matter of the title of viscount, which he had presented to himself by a decree signed with his own hand, let that minister of ancient descent proceed against me for calumny; if I have said nothing but the truth, why do they seize my publication in the Kiosk ? But another seizure of La Lanterne will not alter the fact that M. de Persigny decorated himself with a title which does not figure in his baptismal certificate, nor that his imaginary viscountcy was converted into a real dukedom by a concurrence of unforeseen circumstances. Neither can we forget the answer that this exalted personage, to whom I render homage as duke after having greatly laughed at him as viscount, gave before the same Chamber of Peers referred to above when under examination in the Boulogne affair. And,' asked the President, what would you have done if the officer at whose head you pointed the gun had resisted?' 'I should have shot him,' replied M. de Persigny. And this is the sensitive man who has preached a crusade in favour of the respect due to private life, yet it seems to me that he was prepared in the instance just mentioned to go a deal further into that of others. Now he sends letters to the newspapers inculcating moderation, decorum, and self-restraint. I am quite aware that M. de Persigny has long since ignored his past life. It is an old practice among men who have sown a large quantity of wild oats, as soon as they get into office, and are receiving their hundred thousand crowns, to say in mournful accents, I repudiate my past career.' Nothing is more easy. I have no doubt that any criminal condemned to death would be happy in exchange for life, not only to reprobate his own past career, but that of five or six of his friends. It is quite open to M. de Persigny to believe that he owes his exalted position to his great political ability, but it costs quite enough to those who have to pay him for filling it, to give them the right to ask him if the letters he addressed to the newspapers are worth the money."

6

Though he professes to believe that it was for these reasons it was scized, in his heart he probably believed that it was on account of the references in that number to the husband of Queen Hortense and to the present Empress of France. As regards the spirit and substance of what he says with respect to the former, it is as follows:

"I never can or shall understand why, in these days of the very libertinism of servility, as Tacitus says, when we are continually hearing in official spheres of Queen Hortense, nobody ever thinks of saying a kindly word about her husband, King Louis of Holland. We have been deafened for

years by the repetitions on the street organs of 'Partant pour la Syrie,' and I am quite aware of the interest taken by electors in the knowledge of the fact that before starting

'Le jeune et brave Dunois

Allait prier Marie

De bénir ses exploits,'

but why doesn't somebody bring forward some of the musical compositions of King Louis, and why are not some of the civil and military honours lavished on his wife's poetry accorded to him? There is never an exhibition of painting in which several representations of Queen Hortense do not figure under various disguises, whereas there has not been a shadow of a portrait of her husband. There is something in all this which evidently calls for a communiqué.”

The reference to the Empress in the following paragraph is sufficiently clear :

66

We are informed that the Emperor of China, who has hardly reached his fourteenth year, has just selected an empress from among a batch of his subjects; the reflection he may have made was perhaps this,-'I am going to marry a woman of whom I know nothing. Her education may be defective, but the less she knows of reading, the less likelihood there is of her interference in affairs of government to propagate crinoline, processions, and priests, who to some extent are like women, since they wear petticoats and garter their stockings above the knee.'

The following dialogue, with which he winds up the work of the day when the above was written, is not bad. He says he heard it in a café:

"Waiter! La France.

"Sir, when it is free.'

"I shall have to wait a long time then,' was the answer."

There is something cynical and very painful in the hardihood with which he demonstrates that for most of the unmarried women in Paris, who have no resource but their work, immorality is a necessity to enable them to live. Going one day into the work-room of a bookbinder, in which a large number of women were engaged in stitching and folding the pages of publications, he asked the forewoman how much they earned daily. "Some who are very quick earn a little more, but the average earnings are thirty-five sous a day," was the reply. "But," he answered, "it is utterly impossible that they can live on such a sum." "Oh," responded the woman, "some of them live at home, but most of them have a lover who helps them ;" and this reply was made in the simplest manner, as though it were such a self-evident necessity that they must receive such aid, that there was no room for moral reprobation.

He is satirical on the subject of the amnesty granted by the Emperor of Russia to the Poles in Siberia, which, in eating-house phraseology, he calls an amnesty for one; and which he analyses thus:"To share in this amnesty, it is necessary-1, to be a Pole;

2, to have been in Siberia upwards of three years; 3, to be under twenty years of age: from which," he continues, "we may infer that Russia deports Poles in their infancy. Do they deport nurses to suckle these exiles ?"

Speaking of the absurd extent to which the Ministers carry their objection to the mention of certain names and things, he says, in reference to the application of M. Charles Boissière to be allowed to deliver a course of lectures on dramatic literature, and the permission granted to him on condition that he did not mention the name of Victor Hugo, he says:-

"The person who is least affected by this ostracism is Victor Hugo himself, who, perched on his rock, may well laugh; it is M. Boissière himself who has reason to complain, for how on earth can a man lecture on dramatic literature without mentioning the name of the only man who has written dramas ? . . . . . It is the mania of our governing authorities to pass the india-rubber over the men and things who embarrass or disquiet them. It is some time since they began to withdraw from circulation the money which bore the effigies of preceding sovereigns; yet there is no occasion to be alarmed on account of Louis-Philippe, inasmuch as he has been dead a long time. This sovereign had the simplicity to place on the column in the Place Vendôme a legendary Napoleon, with the little three-cornered hat and the well-known grey overcoat. I am not suspected of any partiality for this great captain, whose sole military genius consisted in taking France when it had attained its greatest dimensions, and resigning it diminished by a sixth, but of all the representations we have of him that certainly was the most popular. Yet rather than leave on its pedestal this statue which, in spite of everything, was associated with the recollection of the Orleans family, after having relegated it to a village where it serves as a mile mark, they replaced it by a comical bronze statue which may represent either a Roman emperor, or a washerwoman who is about to wash her linen (sale en famille). Last year I was going up the grand staircase at Versailles with a child, when he dropped his balloon, and on leaning over the staircase to watch where it went to, I got a glimpse into a narrow court, in which I saw, with its nose against a wall, and carefully screened from observation, the equestrian statue of the Duke of Orleans, which stood so long in the centre of the courtyard of the Louvre. Heaven knows if I am an Orleanist, but such proceedings exhibit such paltriness in ideas and such littleness of mind that one cannot help laughing when one hears official orators repeat a hundred times a day that the Government is strong."

On the inquiry of a correspondent, who wants to know the reason why men who frequent bathing establishments are locked in, so that they cannot get out without ringing for the attendant, and that, moreover, if a bather were suddenly taken ill, he would have time to be drowned three times over before an attendant could come to his assistance; whereas nothing could be easier than to turn a handle and call for help if it were required, he remarks:

"This sequestration has always appeared to me incomprehensible. At first I thought it had been instituted as a safeguard of French modesty, which, as everybody knows, is of a superior quality to every other. No doubt it was feared that some absent-minded bathers might quit the establishment without remembering to put their clothes on first, and only dis

cover their omission when they found themselves on the Boulevard des Italiens. But on thinking the matter over more deeply, it occurred to me the real reason was an exaggerated suspicion of his customers on the part of the proprietor of the baths; who, he feared, might arrogate to themselves. the right of departing with his linen. Doubtless he would be much grieved if he found you lying dead at the bottom of your bath, but he would bear up better against your loss than against the loss of his towels. That is human nature."

The same correspondent also inquires, why it is that the baptismal certificate of a legitimate child should be charged two francs, while that of an illegitimate child it was proposed to acknowledge cost seven francs and a half. After much speculation as to the why and wherefore of this difference, he continues:

"For my part, I am all the more surprised at the disfavour in which natural children are held that France never before had so many illegitimate children filling exalted positions as now. It is true we have been considering the case of natural children acknowledged, which most of these are not."

Englishwomen may be gratified by learning that they are just now in high esteem at Paris. "A young lady," he says, "is not really in the fashionable world unless it can be said of her, 'She was educated at an English Boarding School.' Moral: the first duty of a Frenchwoman in these days is to be born in England of Scotch parents." "Voilà pour les femmes comme il faut; pour les femmes comme il ne faut pas" there is the same predilection in favour of our countrywomen: but the less we repeat of what he says on this subject the better.

Dramatic authors or adapters may be gratified or otherwise, according to the stand-point from which they look at it, at learning that English plays are also in the ascendant, and French dramatists now do to them what they have so long been doing to the theatrical literature of France.* Another notice of the theatres and matters pertaining to them is in reference to Madlle. Leininger's book, entitled "Nos Misères au Théâtre."

"Considering," he says, "that the authoress went on the stage at fifteen, and that ever since that time she has driven her carriage, it is probable that she refers to such vexations as these: When a sister actress has thirty-five lines to her part, while she has only thirty-three. For my part, I think it is the authors who have most reason to complain of these petty vexations. You make me die at the end. What can be more stupid?' says one at the close of the rehearsal. Besides,' she adds, 'I don't know how to die; and I should certainly burst into a fit of laughter. Why not alter the dénouement?' At another time it is the duenna who expresses her astonishment that you should have made her the mother of Mdlle. Pierson, instead of making her her sister-in-law, which would in no way have diminished the interest of the drama. Tantôt c'est une forte amoureuse qui vous fait sommation d'avoir à lui ajouter une scène de viol, où elle excelle, et qui déclare qu'à moins d'une scène de viol, elle refuse le rôle.' . I re

A piece has just been brought out at the Porte St. Martin entitled "Fanny Lear." It is based on the "Memoirs of Harriet Wilson" and her conduct, and is expected to have a long run.