s, too, which fell to my share, vastly increased my
importance. In the course of the five minutes spent in wading through the
crowd of the rejected, I bore fifty different characters--I was a state
prisoner--a deputy from Marseilles, a part of the kingdom then in peculiar
favour; an ex-general; a captain of banditti, and an ambassador from
England or America; in either case, an especially honoured missionary, for
England was then pronounced by all the Parisian authorities to be on the
verge of a revolution. Though, I believe, Jonathan had the preference, for
the double reason, that the love of Jean Francais for John Bull is of a
rather precarious order, and that the American Revolution was an egg
hatched by the warmth of the Gallic bird itself; a secondary sort of
parentage.

As we advanced through the streets, my noisy "compagnons de voyage"
dropped off one by one, some to the lowest places of entertainment, and
some tired of the jest; and I proceeded to the Place de Vendome, where was
my hotel, at my leisure. The streets were now solitary; to a degree that
was almost startling. As I wound my way through long lines of houses,
tortuous, narrow, and dark as Erebus, I saw the cause of the singular
success which had attended all Parisian insurrections. A chain across one
of these dismal streets, an overturned cart, a pile of stones, would
convert it at once into an impassable defile. Walls and windows, massive,
lofty, and nearly touching each other from above afforded a perpetual
fortification; lanes innumerable, and extending from one depth of darkness
and intricacy into another, a network of attack and ambush, obviously gave
an extraordinary advantage to the irregular daring of men accustomed to
thread those wretched and dismal dens, crowded with one of the fiercest
and most capricious populations in the world. Times have strikingly
changed since. The "fifteen fortresses" are but so many strong bars of the
great cage, and they are neither too strong nor too many. Paris is now the
only city on earth which is defended against itself, garrisoned on its
outside, and protected by a perpetual Praetorian band against a national
mania of insurrection.

But, on turning into the Boulevards, the scene changed with the rapidity
of magic. Before me were raging thousands, the multitude which I had seen
advancing to the gates. The houses, as far as the eye could reach, were
lighted up with lamps, torches, and every kind of hurried illu