telegraph wires, and cause damage
to the latter. I happened to meet him on the Boulevards on the very day
the edict was promulgated. He felt evidently very proud of the
conception, and asked me what I thought of it. I told him the story of
"the cow on the rails," according to Stephenson. Napoleon, when he heard
of Walewski's reform, sent for Boitelle. "Here is an 'order in council'
I want you to publish," he said, as seriously as possible. It was to the
effect that "all birds found perching on the wires would be fined, and,
in default of payment, imprisoned." Curiously enough, though a man of
parts, and naturally intelligent, satire of that kind was lost upon him,
for not very long after he prevailed upon M. de Boitelle to revive an
obsolete order with regard to the length of the hackney-drivers' whips
and the cracking thereof. It was M. Carlier, the predecessor of M. de
Maupas, who had originally attempted a similar thing. He was rewarded
with a pictorial skit representing him on the point of drowning, while
cabby was trying to save him by holding out his whip, which proved too
short for the purpose.

Walewski had none of the vivacity of most of the Bonapartes. I knew him
a good many years before, and after the establishment of the Second
Empire, and have rarely seen him out of temper. I fancy he must have
made an admirable ambassador with a good chief at his back; he, himself,
I think, had little spirit of initiative, though, like a good many of
us, he was fully convinced of the contrary. He was, to use the correct
word, frequently dull; nevertheless, it was currently asserted and
believed that he was the only man Rachel ever sincerely cared for. "Je
comprends cela," said George Sand one day, when the matter was discussed
in her presence; "son commerce doit lui reposer l'esprit."

It is worthy of remark that during the reign which succeeded that of
Louis-Philippe, the man who wielded the greatest power next to the
Emperor was, in almost every respect but one, the mental and moral
counterpart of "the citizen king." I am alluding to M. Eugene Rouher,
sometimes called the vice-emperor.[54] I knew Eugene Rouher some years
before he was thought of as a deputy, let alone as a minister--when, in
fact, he was terminating his law courses in the Quartier-Latin; but not
even the most inveterate Pumblechook would have dared to advance
afterwards that he perceived the germs of his future eminence in him
then. He was a good-looki