[Illustration: "TO BRING A QUEEN BACK TO PARIS"] At the gates leading to the great Court of Honor there were possibly two hundred people in all. They came from the neighboring streets, and not from Paris. None of these people spoke in tones louder than those of ordinary converse, and they speculated with indolent interest as to the outcome of the afternoon's voting. A young man in a brown straw hat found an objection to Casimir-Perier as a candidate because he was so rich, but he withdrew his objection when an older man in a blouse pointed out that Casimir-Perier would make an excellent appearance on horseback. "The President of France," he said, "must be a man who can look well on a horse;" and the crowd of old women in white caps, and boy soldiers with their hands on their baggy red breeches, from the barracks across the square, nodded their heads approvingly. It was a most interesting sight when compared with the anxious, howling mob that surrounds the building in which a Presidential convention is being held at home. It is also interesting to remember that a special telephone wire was placed in the Chamber at Versailles in order that the news of the election might be communicated to the newspaper offices in Paris, and that this piece of enterprise was considered so remarkable that it was commented upon by the entire newspaper press of that city. In Chicago, at the time of the last Presidential convention, when a nomination merely and not an election was taking place, the interest of the people justified the Western Union Telegraph Company in sending out fifteen million words from the building during the three days of the convention. Wires ran from it directly to the offices of all the principal newspapers from San Francisco to Boston, and in Chicago itself there were two hundred extra operators, and relays of horsemen galloping continually with "copy" from the convention to the main offices of the different telegraph companies. This merely shows a difference of temperament: the American likes to know what has happened while it is hot, and to know all that has happened. The European and the Parisian, on this occasion at least, was content to wait at a café in ease and comfort until he was told the result. He did not feel that he could change that result in any way by going out to Versailles in the hot sun and cheering his candidate from the outside of an iron fence.