a while, and then--he sits down again! Reading his speeches
now in Paris, I can fancy the count with his hat by his side and his
hand on the door-knob. Heaven knows how many times that comedy-proverb
of Musset called 'A door must either be open or shut,' has been
gravely played by the Sardinian Parliament and the prime minister!"
It is with a very droll effect that a French paper has revived this
curious description, _a propos_ of the perpetual repetition of the
drama played by the French Assembly and the French president, in which
the constant threats of resignation on the one hand are invariably
followed by passionate and despairing entreaties to "stay" on the
other. It is the old story of Cavour and the door-knob over again;
and even the great Bismarck, by the way, does not disdain a resort
occasionally to the same terrible pantomime. "The only _coup d'etat_
to be feared from M. Thiers," said M. Dufaure in the Assembly, "is his
withdrawal." It is, the quarreling and reconciliation of Horace and
Lydia: "What if the door of the repudiated Lydia again open to me?"
"Though you are stormier than blustering Adriatic, I should love to
live with you," etc. Such is the billing and cooing, after quarrel,
between the president and the Assembly. Still, it is clear that the
puissant hat-and-cane argument must date back to Cavour.

* * * * *

The recent proposition of some English writers to elevate a certain
class of suicides to the rank of a legalized "institution," under the
pleasant name of "euthanasia," suggests the inquiry whether, without
any scientific vindication of the practice, there will not always be
suicides enough in ordinary society. At any rate, however it may be in
England, just across the Channel, in France, thousands of people every
year break the "canon 'gainst self-slaughter," leaving the ills they
have to "fly to others that they know not of." The official figures
show that in a period of twenty-two years no less than 71,207 persons
committed suicide in France. The causes were various--business
embarrassments, domestic chagrins, the brutishness produced by liquor,
poverty, insanity, the desire to put an end to physical suffering by
"euthanasia," and so on; but they are pretty nearly all included in
the "fardels" which Hamlet mentions, from the physical troubles of the
"heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to," up
to the mental distress wrought by the "