To the Order of the Weather-cock succeeded, in 1819, when priestly ascendency at court was but too manifest, the Family of the Extinguishers. In the picture given below, the reader has the pleasure of viewing some of the family portraits, and in another he sees members of the family at work, rekindling the fire and extinguishing the lights. The fire was to consume the charter of French liberty and the records of science; the lights are the men to whom France felt herself indebted for liberty and knowledge--Buffon, Franklin, D'Alembert, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Montaigne, Fénélon, Condorcet, and their friends. Above is the personified Church, with sword uplifted, menacing mankind with new St. Bartholomews and Sicilian Vespers. Underneath this elaborate and ingenious work was the refrain of Béranger's song of 1819, entitled "Les Missionnaires," which was almost enough of itself to expel the Bourbons: "Vite soufflons, soufflons, morbleu! Éteignons les lumières Et rallumons le feu." The historian of that period will not omit to examine the songs which the incomparable Béranger wrote during the reign of the two kings of the Restoration. "Le peuple, c'est ma Muse," the poet wrote many years after, when reviewing this period. The people were his Muse. He studied the people, he adds, "with religious care," and always found their deepest convictions in harmony with his own. He had been completely fascinated by the "genius of Napoleon," never suspecting that it was Napoleon's lamentable _want_ of ability which had devolved upon the respectable Louis XVIII. an impossible task. But he perceived that the task _was_ impossible. There were two impossibilities, he thought, in the way of a stable government. It was impossible for the Bourbons, while they remained Bourbons, to govern France, and it was impossible for France to make them any thing but Bourbons. Hence, in lending his exquisite gift to the popular cause, he had no scruples and no reserves; and he freely poured forth those wonderful songs which became immediately part and parcel of the familiar speech of his countrymen. Alas for a Bourbon when there is a Béranger loose in his capital! Charles X. attempted the Bourbon policy of repression, and had the poet twice imprisoned. But he could not imprison his songs, nor prevent his writing new ones in prison, which sung themselves over France in a week. Caricature, too, was severely repressed--the usual precursor of collapse in a French government. [Illustration: The Jesuits at Court. (Paris, 1819.) "Quick! Blow! blow! Let us put out the lights and rekindle the fires!"]