were read, through the smoke of June, on our public monuments all battered with bullets." After so reactionary a tirade, let M. Dumas beware lest, in the first fight that occurs in Paris streets, a Red cartridge snatch him from an admiring world. His moan made for republican illusions, he proceeds to cry the coronach over French society, unhinged, disorganised, destroyed, by successive revolutions. And he calls to mind a visit he paid, in his childhood, to a very old lady, a relic of the past century, and widow of King Louis Philippe's grandfather, to whom Napoleon paid an annuity of one hundred thousand crowns--for what? "_For having preserved in her drawing-rooms the traditions of good society of the times of Louis XIV. and Louis XV._ It is just half what the chamber now gives his nephew for making France forget what his uncle desired she should remember." Take that, President Buonaparte, and go elsewhere for a character than to the _Débit de Romans_ of Mr Alexander Dumas. How is it you have neglected to propitiate the suffrage of the melancholy poet? Repair forthwith the omission. Summon him to the Elysée. Pamper, caress, and consult him, or tremble for the stability of your presidential chair! After Louis Napoleon, comes the turn of the legislative chamber; apropos of which M. Dumas quotes the Marquis d'Argenson's memoirs, where the courtier of 1750 bewails the degeneracy of the times neither more nor less than does the dramatic author of a century later. "People complain," M. d'Argenson says, "that in our day there is no longer any conversation in France. I well know the reason. It is that our cotemporaries daily become less patient listeners. They listen badly, or rather they listen not at all. I have remarked this in the very best circles I frequent." "Now, my dear friend," argues M. Dumas, with irresistible logic, "what is the best society one can frequent at the present day? Very certainly it is that which eight millions of electors have judged worthy to represent the interests, the opinions, the genius of France. It is the chamber, in short. Well! enter the chamber, at a venture, any day and hour that you please. The odds are a hundred to one, that you will find one man speaking in the tribune, and five or six hundred others sitting on the benches, not listening, but interrupting him. And this is so true, that there is an article of the constitution of 1848 prohibiting interruptions. Again, reckon the number of boxes on the ear, and fisticuffs given in the chamber during a year that it has existed--they are innumerable. All in the name--be it well understood--of liberty, equality, and fraternity!" Rather strange language in the mouth of a citizen of the young republic; and its oddness diminishes the surprise with which we find, on turning the page, the captor of the Tuileries paying his devoirs to the most presently prosperous member of the house of Orleans. "Monseigneur," he says, to the illustrious husband of the