wisely
provided, and thanks to them, this blade drips on this Shrove Tuesday.

CHAPTER XI--TO SCOFF, TO REIGN

There is no limit to Paris. No city has had that domination which
sometimes derides those whom it subjugates. To please you, O Athenians!
exclaimed Alexander. Paris makes more than the law, it makes the
fashion; Paris sets more than the fashion, it sets the routine. Paris
may be stupid, if it sees fit; it sometimes allows itself this luxury;
then the universe is stupid in company with it; then Paris awakes, rubs
its eyes, says: "How stupid I am!" and bursts out laughing in the face
of the human race. What a marvel is such a city! it is a strange thing
that this grandioseness and this burlesque should be amicable neighbors,
that all this majesty should not be thrown into disorder by all this
parody, and that the same mouth can to-day blow into the trump of the
Judgment Day, and to-morrow into the reed-flute! Paris has a sovereign
joviality. Its gayety is of the thunder and its farce holds a sceptre.

Its tempest sometimes proceeds from a grimace. Its explosions, its days,
its masterpieces, its prodigies, its epics, go forth to the bounds of
the universe, and so also do its cock-and-bull stories. Its laugh is the
mouth of a volcano which spatters the whole earth. Its jests are sparks.
It imposes its caricatures as well as its ideal on people; the highest
monuments of human civilization accept its ironies and lend their
eternity to its mischievous pranks. It is superb; it has a prodigious
14th of July, which delivers the globe; it forces all nations to take
the oath of tennis; its night of the 4th of August dissolves in three
hours a thousand years of feudalism; it makes of its logic the muscle
of unanimous will; it multiplies itself under all sorts of forms of
the sublime; it fills with its light Washington, Kosciusko, Bolivar,
Bozzaris, Riego, Bem, Manin, Lopez, John Brown, Garibaldi; it is
everywhere where the future is being lighted up, at Boston in 1779,
at the Isle de Leon in 1820, at Pesth in 1848, at Palermo in 1860, it
whispers the mighty countersign: Liberty, in the ear of the American
abolitionists grouped about the boat at Harper's Ferry, and in the ear
of the patriots of Ancona assembled in the shadow, to the Archi before
the Gozzi inn on the seashore; it creates Canaris; it creates Quiroga;
it creates Pisacane; it irradiates the great on earth; it was while
proceeding whither its breath urge