declared it his high will, that the spirit of the country should be _travaillé_--_i. e._ tortured--to his own furious sense: and, in truth, the maintenance of such symbols is a pretty and convenient manner to _travailler_ the public spirit with all the taking gaudiness of outward show. As Minister of the Interior, he is supreme institutor and instigator of popular fêtes, and public republican ceremonies: and, whether of his own fancy, or under the influence of the promptings of minor masters of ceremonies, or of those who would be such, he appears determined that modern republican shows, festivities, and ceremonials, should bring back as many reminiscences of those of a fatal time as possible. In the funeral ceremony of the interment of those who fell in the days of February,--which, in its very nature, as well as from the immense masses it called forth of men of all classes, all corporations, all bodies of the state, citizen troops, and military, with music, and banners, and streaming ribands, was sufficiently imposing,--in this ceremony Paris was again bid to delight itself with the aspect of modern lictors preceding the members of the Provisional Government, with antique fasces--those eternal emblematical fasces,--that had been borrowed from the boards of the _ci-devant_ Théâtre Francais, where they had been used, poor dirty old things, to be paraded by knock-kneed bearers before all the bloody tyrants of the classic drama of France: they were "freshened up," it is true, and made smart, to meet the time and circumstance, by being bound with new tri-color ribands: but they were no less foolish symbols, and worse than foolish, from the effect they might have on sentiments. But this was but the caviare to the feast. A new republican fête is prepared by the same minister of the interior, and that, too, at a time when the public treasury is empty, and a national bankruptcy stares the country in the face--a fête that has no purpose as an anniversary, unless it be some anniversary of a time to be forgotten--an uncalled-for fête, that is to be symbolical of a republican word called "Fraternity," the sense of which no one in France seems, by any effort, to be able to understand,--in fact, to be the vague vain emblem of a vague vain word. What does the programme of this fête set forth? Antique cars, bearing Grecian allegorical personifications of the new-old deities of the day, drawn by huge oxen with gilded horns, borrowed of the Eleusinian mysteries!--and little Lacedemonian girls in white Grecian tunics, singing French patriotic hymns on the boulevards under Grecian pavilions,--hear it, shade of Coleman's Mr Sterling, and rejoice!--and Grecian tripods with burning flames at street-corners--and painted Grecian statues, allegorical of all sorts of fancied Grecian virtues, under the trees of the Champs Elysées--and nonsense only knows how many other Grecian attributes of canvass and pasteboard, and carpentry-work, and stage decoration in