the bonfires of royal furniture lighted in its courts; its windows paneless, its once flowered terraces bare or boarded with planks. And, opposite, the smoked walls of that ruined building, on the other side of the square, where the last defenders of royalty were shot down, or were flung back to perish in the blazing pile of the vast guard-house. But if Paris has thus washed away its blood and dirt, thus mended its rent garments, thus patched over its scars, where then is the great change? Come and see! The scenes with which the streets of republican Paris teem are such as those who have only known the city in its kingly garb have never witnessed. What was the aspect of Paris formerly on one of those bright champagne-like spring days, when the Parisian butterflies of all classes, the humble gray moth as the sparkling tiger-fly, came forth to sun themselves in the golden air? There were crowds--but listless, easy, careless crowds, that sauntered they knew not whither, and turned back they knew not why--crowds of beings who ran over each other, and almost over themselves, as they fluttered hither and thither, enjoying the brightness of the sky without rendering themselves any reckoning of their enjoyment. There are still crowds in the streets; but no longer listless, easy, careless crowds. They form in large groups, and knots, and circles on the pavement, and at street corners, and at the entrance of galleries and passages; and, from the midst of the mass, if you can get near enough to hear, comes the sound of haranguing or of disputing. Each group is an _al fresco_ club in which the interests of the country at large are being discussed; and round about is ever a dark murmuring, and a rumour, and a ferment--and sometimes minor disputants break off from the parent knot; and presently they form a nucleus for a fresh encircling crowd; and another group takes up its standing; and a great banian-tree of politicising knots drops its branches, which thus take root up and down the Boulevards, far and wide, until the whole long avenue is planted with separate little circles of disputants or spouters. Here a well-dressed man assures his unknown auditors that the arbitrary and despotic measures of an obnoxious Minister of the Interior destroy all confidence, and prepare the ruin of the country, with the fear of another Reign of Terror: there a workman on a bench, with violent gesture and inflamed countenance, declares that the salvation of the republic, one and indivisible, hangs upon the despotism--he gives it another name--of the same Minister of the Interior--for the time being, the hero of the people. But think not that the _blouse_ is sundered from the frock-coat, or the varnished boot from the clouted shoe. Here you see a young _élégant_ of the Faubourg St Germain, his legitimist principles and his old dynastic hopes prudently concealed behind the axiom, "All for France! _Français avant tout!_" discussing