ted in a great cistern. In these days it
could not hold out an hour against a single gun-boat.

It is a pleasant drive from Avranches to Vire; and Vire itself is a
pleasant place,--a quiet little town, placed high, in bracing air, and
with beautiful walks round it. The comfortable, though unpretending,
little Hotel de St. Pierre stands outside the town, and commands a fine
view. While I was at Vire, the _fete_ day of the Emperor was
celebrated--with profound apathy. Not a dozen houses responded to the
_prefet's_ invitation to illuminate. There being no troops in the town,
and a military show being indispensable, there was a review of the
firemen in military uniforms; a single brass cannon pestered us with its
noise all the morning; the "veterans" of the Napoleonic army (every
surviving drummer-boy of the army of 1815 goes by that name) were
dismally paraded about, and the firemen practised with their muskets,
very awkwardly, at a mark which was so placed among the trees that they
could hardly see it.

Why has not the government the sense to let these people alone? After
all their revolutions and convulsions, they have sunk into perfect
political indifference, and literally care not a straw whether they are
governed by Napoleon, Nero, or Nebuchadnezzar. To be always appealing to
them with Bonapartist demonstrations and manifestoes, is to awaken
political sentiments, in them, and so to create a danger which does not
exist.

If Louis Napoleon is in any peril, it is not from the republican or
constitutional party, but from his own lavish expenditure, which begins
to irritate the people. They are careless of their rights as freemen,
but they are fond, and growing daily fonder, of money; and they do not
like to be heavily taxed, and to hear at the same time that the Emperor
is wasting on his personal expenses and those of his relatives and
courtiers some six millions of dollars a year. Regard for economy is the
only profession which distinguishes the addresses of the so-called
opposition candidates from those of their competitors. I asked a good
many people what they thought of the Mexican expedition. Not one of them
objected to its injustice, but they all objected to its cost, "Cela
mangera beaucoup d'argent," was the invariable reply. And in this point
of view the government has committed what it would think much worse than
any crime,--a very damaging blunder.

It does not appear that the Orleans family have any hold on