ir crucibles heating, all their alembics
boiling, all their strange materials in full effervescence; and their eyes
fixed in doubt, and perhaps in awe, on the powerful and hazardous products
about to result from combinations untried before, and amalgams which might
shatter the roof above their heads, or extinguish their existence by a
blast of poison.

I had left Paris Democracy. I found it a Despotism. I had left it a
melancholy prey to the multitude; a startling scene of alternate fury and
dejection; of cries for revenge, and supplications for bread; of the
tyranny of the mob, and the misery of the nation. I now found it the most
striking contrast to that scene of despair;--Paris the headquarters of a
military government; the Tuileries the palace of a conqueror; every sound
martial; the eye dazzled every where by the spoils of the German and
Italian sovereignties; the nation flushed with victory. Still, the public
aspect exhibited peculiarities which interested me the more, that they
could never have appeared in older times, and probably will never return.
In the midst of military splendour there was a wild, haggard, and unhappy
character stamped on all things. The streets of the capital had not yet
felt the influence of that imperial taste which was to render it an
imperial city. I saw the same shattered suburbs, the same deep, narrow,
and winding streets, the same dismal lanes; in which I had witnessed so
often the gatherings of the armed multitude, and which seemed made for
popular commotion. Mingled with those wild wrecks and gloomy places of
refuge, rather than dwellings, I saw, with their ancient ornaments, and
even with their armorial bearings and gilded shields and spears not yet
entirely defaced, the palaces of the noblesse and blood-royal of France,
the remnants of those ten centuries of monarchy which had been powerful
enough to reduce the bold tribes of the Franks to a civilized slavery, and
glittering enough to make them in love with their chains. If I could have
imagined, in the nineteenth century, a camp of banditti on its most showy
scale--a government of Condottieri with its most famous captain at its
head--every where a compilation of arms and spoils, the rude habits of the
robber combined with the pomp of military triumph--I should have said that
the realization was before me.

The Palais Royal was still the chief scene of all Parisian vitality. But
the mob orators were to be found there no more. Th