uraged.

Of the out-door gay life by gas-light, we saw less than we had hoped to
see in the French capital. The season was unusually cold and wet, and
most of the time it would have required the spirit of a martyr to sip
coffee upon the sidewalk. One garden concert we did attend, and found it
very bright and fairy-like, and all the other adjectives used in this
connection. We sat wrapped in shawls, our feet upon the rounds of the
chair before us, and shivered a little, and enjoyed a great deal. We
went one night--in most orthodox company--to the Cirque de
l'Imperatrice, a royal amphitheatre with handsome horses, pretty
equestriennes, and a child balanced and tossed about on horseback,
showing a frightened, painful smile, which made of the man who held her
a Herod in our eyes. A girl very rich in paint and powder, but somewhat
destitute in other particulars, skipped and danced upon a slack rope in
a most joyous and airy manner. When we came out, a haggard woman, with
an old, worn face, was crouching in a little weary heap by the door that
led into the stables, wrapped in an old cloak; and that was our dancing
girl!

We went to the opera, too; it was Les Huguenots. To this day I cannot
tell who were the singers. I never knew, or thought, or cared. And the
bare shoulders flashing with jewels in the boxes around us, the
_claqueurs_ in the centre, hired to applaud, clapping their hands with
the regularity of clock-work, the empty imperial box, were nothing to
the sight of Paris portrayed within itself. You know the familiar opera;
do think how strange it was to see it in Paris; to look upon the stage
and behold the Seine and the towers of Notre Dame; the excited populace
rising up to slay and to be slain, with all the while this same fickle
French people serenely smiling, and chatting, and looking upon it--the
people who were even then ready at a word to reenact the same scenes for
a different cause. Just outside, only a day or two before, something of
the same spirit, portrayed here for our amusement, had broken out again
in the election riots. And we remembered that, as we drove around the
corner to the opera house, mounted soldiers stood upon either side,
while every other man upon the street was the eye, and ear, and arm of
the emperor, who knew that the very ground beneath his fair, white city
tottered and reeled.

We saw the emperor and empress one day, after having looked for them
long and in vain upon the Champs E