M. Dupuy, his late rival at the polls, seats himself beside him on his left, and two officers in uniform face him from the front. Before his carriage are two open lines of cavalry, proudly conscious in their steel breastplates and with their carbines on the hip that they are to convoy the new President to Paris; and behind him, in close order, are the lancers, with their flashing brass helmets, and their pennants fluttering in the wind. The horses start forward with a sharp clatter of hoofs on the broad stones of the square, the Deputies raise their high hats, and with a jangling of steel chains and swords, and with the pennants snapping in the breeze like tiny whips, the new President starts on his triumphal ride into Paris. The colossal statues of France's great men, from Charlemagne to Richelieu, look down upon him curiously as he whirls between them to the iron gateway and disappears in the alley of mounted men and cheering civilians. He is out of it in a moment, and has galloped on in a whirling cloud of yellow dust towards the city lying seven miles away, where, six months later, by his unexpected resignation, he is to create a consternation as intense as that which preceded his election. It would be interesting to know of what Casimir-Perier thought as he rode through the empty streets in the cool of the summer evening, startling the villagers at their dinners, and bringing them on a run to the doors by the ringing jangle of his mounted men and the echoing hoofs. Perhaps he thought of the anarchists who might attempt his life, or of those who succeeded with the man whose place he had taken, or, what is more likely, he gave himself up to the moment, and said to himself, as each new face was framed by a window or peered through a doorway: "Yes, it is the new President of France, Casimir-Perier; not only of France, but of all her colonies. By to-night they will know in Siam, in Tunis, in Algiers, and in the swamps of Dahomey that there is a new step on the floor, and governors of provinces, and native rulers of barbarous states, and _sous-préfets_, and pretenders to the throne of France, will consider anxiously what the change means to them, and will be measuring their fortunes with mine."