e slums.
Such was their fate on May 20th, shortly after Buonaparte's arrival at
Paris. Any dreams which he may have harboured of restoring the
Jacobins to power were dissipated, for Paris now plunged into the
gaieties of the _ancien regime_. The Terror was remembered only as a
horrible nightmare, which served to add zest to the pleasures of the
present. In some circles no one was received who had not lost a
relative by the guillotine. With a ghastly merriment characteristic of
the time, "victim balls" were given, to which those alone were
admitted who could produce the death warrant of some family
connection: these secured the pleasure of dancing in costumes which
recalled those of the scaffold, and of beckoning ever and anon to
their partners with nods that simulated the fall of the severed head.
It was for this, then, that the amiable Louis, the majestic Marie
Antoinette, the Minerva-like Madame Roland, the Girondins vowed to the
utter quest of liberty, the tyrant-quelling Danton, the incorruptible
Robespierre himself, had felt the fatal axe; in order that the mimicry
of their death agonies might tickle jaded appetites, and help to weave
anew the old Circean spells. So it seemed to the few who cared to
think of the frightful sacrifices of the past, and to measure them
against the seemingly hopeless degradation of the present.

Some such thoughts seem to have flitted across the mind of Buonaparte
in those months of forced inactivity. It was a time of disillusionment.
Rarely do we find thenceforth in his correspondence any gleams of
faith respecting the higher possibilities of the human race. The
golden visions of youth now vanish along with the _bonnet rouge_ and
the jargon of the Terror. His bent had ever been for the material and
practical: and now that faith in the Jacobinical creed was vanishing,
it was more than ever desirable to grapple that errant balloon to
substantial facts. Evidently, the Revolution must now trust to the
clinging of the peasant proprietors to the recently confiscated lands
of the Church and of the emigrant nobles. If all else was vain and
transitory, here surely was a solid basis of material interests to
which the best part of the manhood of France would tenaciously adhere,
defying alike the plots of reactionaries and the forces of monarchical
Europe. Of these interests Buonaparte was to be the determined
guarantor. Amidst much that was visionary in his later policy he never
wavered in his c