s and
his strength, the emblem of this strong and hideous nation--sublime
in its mechanical intelligence, patient in its season, and once in a
century terrible, inflammable as gunpowder, and ripe with brandy for
the madness of revolution, with wits enough, in fine, to take fire at
a captious word, which signifies to it always: Gold and Pleasure! If
we comprise in it all those who hold out their hands for an alms, for
lawful wages, or the five francs that are granted to every kind of
Parisian prostitution, in short, for all the money well or ill earned,
this people numbers three hundred thousand individuals. Were it not for
the _cabarets_, would not the Government be overturned every Tuesday?
Happily, by Tuesday, this people is glutted, sleeps off its pleasure, is
penniless, and returns to its labor, to dry bread, stimulated by a need
of material procreation, which has become a habit to it. None the
less, this people has its phenomenal virtues, its complete men, unknown
Napoleons, who are the type of its strength carried to its highest
expression, and sum up its social capacity in an existence wherein
thought and movement combine less to bring joy into it than to
neutralize the action of sorrow.

Chance has made an artisan economical, chance has favored him with
forethought, he has been able to look forward, has met with a wife and
found himself a father, and, after some years of hard privation, he
embarks in some little draper's business, hires a shop. If neither
sickness nor vice blocks his way--if he has prospered--there is the
sketch of this normal life.

And, in the first place, hail to that king of Parisian activity, to whom
time and space give way. Yes, hail to that being, composed of saltpetre
and gas, who makes children for France during his laborious nights,
and in the day multiplies his personality for the service, glory,
and pleasure of his fellow-citizens. This man solves the problem
of sufficing at once to his amiable wife, to his hearth, to the
_Constitutionnel_, to his office, to the National Guard, to the opera,
and to God; but, only in order that the _Constitutionnel_, his office,
the National Guard, the opera, his wife, and God may be changed into
coin. In fine, hail to an irreproachable pluralist. Up every day at five
o'clock, he traverses like a bird the space which separates his dwelling
from the Rue Montmartre. Let it blow or thunder, rain or snow, he is at
the _Constitutionnel_, and waits there