ack of funds and soldiers."

With a fork flourished above Raphael's head, Emile outlined a crown upon
it. The notary bethought himself a moment, but soon fell to drinking
again, with a gesture peculiar to himself; it was quite impossible,
it seemed to say to secure in his clientele the cities of Valence and
Byzantium, the Emperor Valens, Mahmoud, and the house of Valentinois.

"Should not the destruction of those ant-hills, Babylon, Tyre, Carthage,
and Venice, each crushed beneath the foot of a passing giant, serve as
a warning to man, vouchsafed by some mocking power?" said Claude Vignon,
who must play the Bossuet, as a sort of purchased slave, at the rate of
fivepence a line.

"Perhaps Moses, Sylla, Louis XI., Richelieu, Robespierre, and Napoleon
were but the same man who crosses our civilizations now and again, like
a comet across the sky," said a disciple of Ballanche.

"Why try to fathom the designs of Providence?" said Canalis, maker of
ballads.

"Come, now," said the man who set up for a critic, "there is nothing
more elastic in the world than your Providence."

"Well, sir, Louis XIV. sacrificed more lives over digging the
foundations of the Maintenon's aqueducts, than the Convention expended
in order to assess the taxes justly, to make one law for everybody, and
one nation of France, and to establish the rule of equal inheritance,"
said Massol, whom the lack of a syllable before his name had made a
Republican.

"Are you going to leave our heads on our shoulders?" asked Moreau (of
the Oise), a substantial farmer. "You, sir, who took blood for wine just
now?"

"Where is the use? Aren't the principles of social order worth some
sacrifices, sir?"

"Hi! Bixiou! What's-his-name, the Republican, considers a landowner's
head a sacrifice!" said a young man to his neighbor.

"Men and events count for nothing," said the Republican, following out
his theory in spite of hiccoughs; "in politics, as in philosophy, there
are only principles and ideas."

"What an abomination! Then you would ruthlessly put your friends to
death for a shibboleth?"

"Eh, sir! the man who feels compunction is your thorough scoundrel, for
he has some notion of virtue; while Peter the Great and the Duke of Alva
were embodied systems, and the pirate Monbard an organization."

"But can't society rid itself of your systems and organizations?" said
Canalis.

"Oh, granted!" cried the Republican.

"That stupid Republic of yours makes me