person, that is to say, somebody who can put himself above other people.
The constitutional thimble-rig is carried on to-day, dear boy, more
seriously than ever. The infamous monarchy, displaced by the heroism of
the people, was a sort of drab, you could laugh and revel with her; but
La Patrie is a shrewish and virtuous wife, and willy-nilly you must take
her prescribed endearments. Then besides, as you know, authority passed
over from the Tuileries to the journalists, at the time when the Budget
changed its quarters and went from the Faubourg Saint-Germain to the
Chaussee de Antin. But this you may not know perhaps. The Government,
that is, the aristocracy of lawyers and bankers who represent the
country to-day, just as the priests used to do in the time of the
monarchy, has felt the necessity of mystifying the worthy people of
France with a few new words and old ideas, like philosophers of
every school, and all strong intellects ever since time began. So now
Royalist-national ideas must be inculcated, by proving to us that it
is far better to pay twelve million francs, thirty-three centimes to
La Patrie, represented by Messieurs Such-and-Such, than to pay eleven
hundred million francs, nine centimes to a king who used to say _I_
instead of _we_. In a word, a journal, with two or three hundred
thousand francs, good, at the back of it, has just been started, with a
view to making an opposition paper to content the discontented, without
prejudice to the national government of the citizen-king. We scoff
at liberty as at despotism now, and at religion or incredulity quite
impartially. And since, for us, 'our country' means a capital where
ideas circulate and are sold at so much a line, a succulent dinner every
day, and the play at frequent intervals, where profligate women swarm,
where suppers last on into the next day, and light loves are hired by
the hour like cabs; and since Paris will always be the most adorable of
all countries, the country of joy, liberty, wit, pretty women, _mauvais
sujets_, and good wine; where the truncheon of authority never makes
itself disagreeably felt, because one is so close to those who wield
it,--we, therefore, sectaries of the god Mephistopheles, have engaged to
whitewash the public mind, to give fresh costumes to the actors, to put
a new plank or two in the government booth, to doctor doctrinaires,
and warm up old Republicans, to touch up the Bonapartists a bit, and
revictual the Centre;