utopia--a steamboat. The Parisians stared indifferently at
this useless thing. M. de Vaublanc, the reformer of the Institute by
a coup d'etat, the distinguished author of numerous academicians,
ordinances, and batches of members, after having created them, could
not succeed in becoming one himself. The Faubourg Saint-Germain and the
pavilion de Marsan wished to have M. Delaveau for prefect of police, on
account of his piety. Dupuytren and Recamier entered into a quarrel in
the amphitheatre of the School of Medicine, and threatened each other
with their fists on the subject of the divinity of Jesus Christ. Cuvier,
with one eye on Genesis and the other on nature, tried to please bigoted
reaction by reconciling fossils with texts and by making mastodons
flatter Moses.

M. Francois de Neufchateau, the praiseworthy cultivator of the memory
of Parmentier, made a thousand efforts to have pomme de terre [potato]
pronounced parmentiere, and succeeded therein not at all. The Abbe
Gregoire, ex-bishop, ex-conventionary, ex-senator, had passed, in the
royalist polemics, to the state of "Infamous Gregoire." The locution of
which we have made use--passed to the state of--has been condemned as a
neologism by M. Royer Collard. Under the third arch of the Pont de Jena,
the new stone with which, the two years previously, the mining aperture
made by Blucher to blow up the bridge had been stopped up, was still
recognizable on account of its whiteness. Justice summoned to its bar a
man who, on seeing the Comte d'Artois enter Notre Dame, had said aloud:
"Sapristi! I regret the time when I saw Bonaparte and Talma enter the
Bel Sauvage, arm in arm." A seditious utterance. Six months in prison.
Traitors showed themselves unbuttoned; men who had gone over to the
enemy on the eve of battle made no secret of their recompense, and
strutted immodestly in the light of day, in the cynicism of riches and
dignities; deserters from Ligny and Quatre-Bras, in the brazenness of
their well-paid turpitude, exhibited their devotion to the monarchy in
the most barefaced manner.

This is what floats up confusedly, pell-mell, for the year 1817, and is
now forgotten. History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot
do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it. Nevertheless, these
details, which are wrongly called trivial,--there are no trivial facts
in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation,--are useful. It is of
the physiognomy of the years that the