amicably a knotty point about elections, or the measures of the Provisional Government, with an unshaved artisan in a smock: and look! they are of one mind--or apparently so--and the kid-gloved hand grasps the rough, callous, toil-hardened palm. Here again a good _bourgeois_, a shopkeeper, in his uniform as a National Guard, the grocer of your street corner maybe, holds _Monsieur_ the ex-Count, his customer, by the button, to develop his last republican scheme for the certain remedy of the financial crisis. A little further on, a dark-browed man, in a ragged coat, with a tricolor cockade, scarcely concealing the blood-red ribbon beneath, declares to a knot of young schoolboys, that the only method to avert the general misery is by the spoliation of the vile rich; but meets with little sympathy, and goes away scowling, as if he thought that his time would yet come. And here again a _gamin_, a very child, with his snub nose insolently cocked in the air, his sabre bound about his body, and his musket on his arm--for he just comes from keeping guard--is holding forth upon the interests of the Republic to a red-faced, mustached old gentleman, who looks like an old general; and who smiles good-temperedly on the urchin, and listens, until the young patriot thinks probably that he has sufficiently enlightened "granny" upon the art of sucking republican eggs, and swaggers off, screeching _Mourir pour la Patrie_, at the top of his shrill voice. And around each of these minor centres of two suns is all the hemisphere of listening planets and satellites. And thus every where is a fusion, according to the best-established republican principles of _égalité_: and no great harm done, were the doctrine to rest there--every where ferment, commotion, murmur, movement. But the old Parisian _flaneur_, with his easily satisfied curiosity, his desultory wanderings, his careless movements--and what Parisian of the street-crowds, man, woman, or child, had not formerly more or less of the spirit of a true _flaneur_?--is gone from the streets of Paris. A _citizen_ has something else to do than _flaner_: he feels all the weight of the interests of the country on his own individual shoulders; and he has no time now but for making harangues, on which the welfare of France depends, and discussing political or social questions, equally for the welfare of all humanity. It is wonderful how quickly the change has come over the spirit of his dream. But fashion and contagion work miracles.