e walks and cafes were
now crowed with bold figures, epauleted and embroidered, laughing and
talking with the easy air of men who felt themselves masters, and who
evidently regarded every thing round them as the furnishing of a camp. The
land had now undergone its third stage of that great spell by which
nations are urged and roused at the will of a few. The crosier was the
first wand of the magician, then came the sceptre--we were now under the
spell of the sword. I was delighted at this transformation of France, from
the horrid form of popular domination to the showy supremacy of
soldiership. It still had its evils. But the guillotine had disappeared.
Savage hearts and sanguinary hands no longer made the laws, and executed
them. Instead of the groans and execrations, the cries of rage and
clamours of despair, which once echoed through all the streets, I now
heard only popular songs and dances, and saw all the genuine evidences of
that rejoicing with which the multitude had thrown off the most deadly of
all tyrannies--its own.

The foreigner shapes every thing into the picturesque, and all his
picturesque now was military. Every regiment which passed through Paris on
its way from the frontier was reviewed, in front of the palace, by the
First Consul; and those reviews formed the finest of all military
spectacles, for each had a character and a history of its own.--The
regiment which had stormed the bridge of Lodi; the regiment which had
headed the assault on the _tete-du-pont_ at Mantua; the regiment which had
led the march at the passage of the St Bernard; the regiment which had
formed the advance of Dessaix at Marengo--all had their separate
distinctions, and were received with glowing speeches and appropriate
honours by the chief of the state. The popular vanity was flattered by a
perpetual pageant, and that pageant wholly different from the tinsel
displays of the monarchy: no representation of legends, trivial in their
origin, and ridiculous in their memory; but the revival of transactions in
which every man of France felt almost a personal interest, which were the
true sources of the new system of nations, and whose living actors were
seen passing, hour after hour, before the national eye. All was vivid
reality, where all had been false glitter in the days of the Bourbons, and
all sullenness and fear in the days of the Democracy. The reality might
still be rough and stern, but it was substantial, and not without it