o sing "La
Parisienne," composed by Casimir de la Vigne, after Alexandre Dumas had
refused to write a national hymn; and they, moreover, insisted on the
King joining in the chorus of the old hymn, as he had hitherto done on
all public occasions.[35] They had grumblingly resigned themselves to
his beating time no longer, but any further refusal of his co-operation
might have been resented in a less peaceful fashion. On the other hand,
there was the bourgeoisie who were of opinion that, now that the
monarchy had entered upon a more conservative period, the intoning of
the hymn, at any rate on the sovereign's part, was out of place, and
savoured too much of a republican manifestation. "It was Guizot who told
him so," said Lord ----, who had been standing on the balcony of the
Tuileries on the occasion of the king's "saint's day,"[36] and had heard
the minister make the remark.

[Footnote 35: When there was no public occasion, his political
antagonists or merely practical jokers who knew of his dislike
invented one, like Edouard d'Ourliac, a well-known journalist
and the author of several novels, who, whenever he had nothing
better to do, recruited a band of street arabs to go and sing
the Marseillaise under the king's windows. They kept on singing
until Louis-Philippe, in sheer self-defence, was obliged to
come out and join in the song.--EDITOR.]

[Footnote 36: In France it is the Patron Saint's day, not the
birthday, that is kept.]

"And what did the king reply?" was the question.

"Do not worry yourself, monsieur le ministre; I am only moving my lips;
I have ceased to pronounce the words for many a day."

These were the expedients to which Louis-Philippe was reduced before he
had been on the throne half a dozen years. "I am like the fool between
two stools," observed the king in English, afterwards, when speaking to
Lord ----, "only I happen to be between the comfortably stuffed
easy-chair of the bourgeois drawing-room and the piece of furniture
seated on which Louis XIV. is said to have received the Dutch
ambassadors."

While speaking of the Marseillaise, here are two stories in connection
with it which are not known to the general reader. The first was told to
me by the old tutor already mentioned; the second aroused a great deal
of literary curiosity in the year 1860, and bears the stamp of truth on
the face of it. It was,