ady he
felt himself a sultan, and thought of demanding from Madame Jules,
imperiously, all her secrets.

In those days Paris was seized with a building-fever. If Paris is
a monster, it is certainly a most mania-ridden monster. It becomes
enamored of a thousand fancies: sometimes it has a mania for building,
like a great seigneur who loves a trowel; soon it abandons the trowel
and becomes all military; it arrays itself from head to foot as a
national guard, and drills and smokes; suddenly, it abandons military
manoeuvres and flings away cigars; it is commercial, care-worn, falls
into bankruptcy, sells its furniture on the place de Chatelet, files its
schedule; but a few days later, lo! it has arranged its affairs and is
giving fetes and dances. One day it eats barley-sugar by the mouthful,
by the handful; yesterday it bought "papier Weymen"; to-day the
monster's teeth ache, and it applies to its walls an alexipharmatic
to mitigate their dampness; to-morrow it will lay in a provision of
pectoral paste. It has its manias for the month, for the season, for the
year, like its manias of a day.

So, at the moment of which we speak, all the world was building or
pulling down something,--people hardly knew what as yet. There were very
few streets in which high scaffoldings on long poles could not be seen,
fastened from floor to floor with transverse blocks inserted into holes
in the walls on which the planks were laid,--a frail construction,
shaken by the brick-layers, but held together by ropes, white with
plaster, and insecurely protected from the wheels of carriages by the
breastwork of planks which the law requires round all such buildings.
There is something maritime in these masts, and ladders, and cordage,
even in the shouts of the masons. About a dozen yards from the hotel
Maulincour, one of these ephemeral barriers was erected before a house
which was then being built of blocks of free-stone. The day after the
event we have just related, at the moment when the Baron de Maulincour
was passing this scaffolding in his cabriolet on his way to see Madame
Jules, a stone, two feet square, which was being raised to the upper
storey of this building, got loose from the ropes and fell, crushing the
baron's servant who was behind the cabriolet. A cry of horror shook both
the scaffold and the masons; one of them, apparently unable to keep his
grasp on a pole, was in danger of death, and seemed to have been touched
by the stone as