o them,
you give their names to streets, you give yourselves the offices, the
promotions, and the big salaries, and we folks, who made the revolution,
you call us great citizens, heroes, a nation of brave men, etc. That's
the coin we are paid with.

"And then there are other insurrections which displease you. As a
result, transportation, death. Well, you see, if you hadn't complimented
us so after the first ones, perhaps we wouldn't have made the last. If
you hadn't raised the Column of July at the entrance of our
neighborhood, we wouldn't perhaps have gone and demolished the Vendome
Column in your neighborhood. Those two penny trumpets didn't agree. One
had to upset the other, and that is what happened.

"Now, why I threw away my captain's uniform on the 26th of May, why I
was in a blouse when I was arrested, I will tell you. When I learned
that the gentlemen of the Commune, instead of coming to shoot with us
behind the barricades, were at the Hotel de Ville distributing among
themselves thousand-franc notes, were shaving their beards, dyeing their
hair, and hiding themselves in caves, I did not wish to keep the
shoulder-straps they had given me.

"Besides, shoulder-straps embarrassed me. 'Captain Martin' sounded
idiotic. 'Insurgent Martin'--why, that's well and good. I wanted to end
as I had begun, die as my father had died, as a rioter in a riot, as a
barricader behind a barricade.

"I could not get killed. I got caught. I belong to you. But I wish to
beg a favor of you. I have a son, a child of seventeen; he is at
Cherbourg, on the hulks. He fought, it is true, and he does not deny it;
but it is I who put a musket in his hand, it is I who told him that his
duty was there. He listened to me. He obeyed me. That is all his crime.
Do not sentence him too harshly.

"As for me, you have got me; do not let me go, that's the advice I give
you. I am too old to mend; and then, what can you expect? Nothing can
change it. I was born on the wrong side of the barricade."

THE CHINESE AMBASSADOR

In the beginning of the year 1870 some English and French residents had
been massacred in China. Reparation was demanded. His Excellency
Tchong-Keon, Tutor of the Heir-apparent and Vice-President of the War
Department, was sent to Europe as Ambassador Extraordinary to the
English and French governments.

Tchong-Keon has recently published at Pekin a very curious account of
his voyage. One of my friends who lives in Sha