After twelve years of active engagement on the disturbed theatre of public life; after having seen the rise and fall of contending factions at home and abroad; after having beheld the theories I had studied completely belie themselves in practice, I may, I think, be entitled to give an opinion on political occurrences and public establishments. On such considerations I proceed to describe the governments, laws, institutions, manners, relative form, internal resources and ultimate view of a people, whom I have seen at one time frivolous, abject and superstitious; at another period starting like Lazarus from a dead repose, roused to a vindication of national liberty; afterwards the base tools of sanguinary demagogues, furious, vindictive and cowardly, renouncing their obligations to God and man, and astounding the civilised world by their folly and their crime--next sighing after that regulated freedom and social order for which they had shed the blood of millions, but never been worthy or able enough to establish; lastly, conscious of their unfitness to be free, relapsing again into the bosom of that ancient despotism, which they had disdainfully trodden under foot, with all the superadded terrors of military government, and a suspicious administration; laughing at the very names of public virtue and public liberty, and themselves the terror and the mockery of Europe. These are great events, worthy of solemn investigation; they have no parallel in the history of mankind. The principal agents in these scenes merit alternate pity and indignation, but the scenes themselves illustrate and present to our minds during the short space of ten years the history of men for ages. XI DESCRIPTION OF LONGCHAMPS. BOIS DE BOULOGNE AND THE BOULEVARDS Strangers in Paris are always recommended to visit the theatres and places of public amusements. Arts, manufactures, courts of justice, useful institutions and distinguished characters in the literary and political worlds rarely trouble. We arrived in good time to see the Easter Promenade de Longchamps in the Bois de Boulogne. This ceremony is for the time uppermost in the heads of the Parisians, it was the only subject of conversation; and every one quitted his house and shop to take a share in the spectacle. The uninitiated might therefore conclude that this favourite diversion of the public was a grand and splendid scene, rivalling the marriage of the Adriatic or the Carnival at Rome. [Sidenote: BOIS DE BOULOGNE] It is on the contrary an insipid and contemptible show, consisting merely in the procession of a long string of coaches, cabriolets, carts and horsemen; with a few boobies mounted on asses, making wry faces, and a number of Merry Andrews playing fantastic antics for the diversion of the populace. There was much noise but no real mirth.