mon cher, n'est rien--il ne compte pas--il a ete
tout-a-fait en famille--il faut diner (en verite, diner) bientot. Au
plaisir! Au revoir! Au diner!'"

The second dinner came, wonderful as the first; among the company were
Regnier, Jules Sandeau, and the new Director of the Francais; and his
host again played Lucullus in the same style, with success even more
consummate. The only absolutely new incident however was that "After
dinner he asked me if I would come into another room and smoke a cigar?
and on my saying Yes, coolly opened a drawer, containing about 5000
inestimable cigars in prodigious bundles--just as the Captain of the
Robbers in _Ali Baba_ might have gone to a corner of the cave for bales
of brocade. A little man dined who was blacking shoes 8 years ago, and
is now enormously rich--the richest man in Paris--having ascended with
rapidity up the usual ladder of the Bourse. By merely observing that
perhaps he might come down again, I clouded so many faces as to render
it very clear to me that _everybody present_ was at the same game for
some stake or other!" He returned to that subject in a letter a few days
later. "If you were to see the steps of the Bourse at about 4 in the
afternoon, and the crowd of blouses and patches among the speculators
there assembled, all howling and haggard with speculation, you would
stand aghast at the consideration of what must be going on. Concierges
and people like that perpetually blow their brains out, or fly into the
Seine, 'a cause des pertes sur la Bourse.' I hardly ever take up a
French paper without lighting on such a paragraph. On the other hand,
thoroughbred horses without end, and red velvet carriages with white kid
harness on jet black horses, go by here all day long; and the
pedestrians who turn to look at them, laugh, and say 'C'est la Bourse!'
Such crashes must be staved off every week as have not been seen since
Law's time."

Another picture connects itself with this, and throws light on the
speculation thus raging. The French loans connected with the war, so
much puffed and praised in England at the time for the supposed spirit
in which they were taken up, had in fact only ministered to the
commonest and lowest gambling; and the war had never in the least been
popular. "Emile Girardin," wrote Dickens on the 23rd of March, "was here
yesterday, and he says that Peace is to be formally announced at Paris
to-morrow amid general apathy." But the French are never wh