As I stood glancing over the groups on the friezes and faces of this great monument, which exhibit war in every form of conflict, havoc, and victory, the homely thought of "_cui bono_?" struck me irresistibly. Who was the better for all this havoc?--Napoleon, whom it sent to a dungeon! or the miserable thousands and tens of thousands whom it crushed in the field?--or the perhaps more unfortunate hundreds of thousands whom it sent to the hospital, to die the slow death of exhaustion and pain, or to live the protracted life of mutilation? I have no affectation of sentiment at the sight of the soldier's grave; he has but taken his share of the common lot, with perhaps the advantage, which so few men possess, of having "done the state some service." But, to see this vast monument covered with the emblems of hostilities, continued through almost a quarter of a century, (for the groups commence with 1792;) to think of the devastation of the fairest countries of Europe, of which these hostilities were the cause; and to know the utter fruitlessness and failure of the result, the short-lived nature of the triumph, and the frightful depth of the defeat---Napoleon in ignominious bondage and hopeless banishment--Napoleon, after having lorded it over Europe, sent to linger out life on a rock in the centre of the ocean--the leader of military millions kept under the eye of a British sentinel, and no more suffered to stray beyond his bounds than a caged tiger--I felt as if the object before me was less a trophy than a tomb, less a monument of glory than of retribution, less the record of national triumph than of national frenzy. I had full liberty for reflection, for there was scarcely a human being to interrupt me. The bustle of the capital did not reach so far, the promenaders in the Champs Elysées did not venture here; the showy equipages of the Parisian "_nouveaux riches_" remained where the crowd was to be seen; and except a few peasants going on their avocations, and a bench full of soldiers, sleeping or smoking away the weariness of the hour, the _Arc de Triomphe_, which had cost so much treasure, and was the record of so much blood, seemed to be totally forgotten. I question, if there had been a decree of the Legislature to sell the stones, whether it would have occasioned more than a paragraph in the _Journal des Debats_.