there never was anything much to be seen. What little there was in the way of civic uproar was centred round the reactionary and anti-semitic beershop Maxeville on the Boulevard. It rarely led to anything but a few arrests of a few hours’ duration, and then we quieted down to await with fortitude and patience the next explosion. The public ball is, if less revolutionary in its consequences, more morally disastrous. The French love dancing; when they dance together in the open or in big kitchens, as the peasants dance, there is nothing for us to do but cheer and envy them. Here we recognise in the dancing of tired workers a legitimate outlet for compressed activities, the eternal measure of joy which children of nature must ever tread. If it lead to love and marriage, or, maybe, only through the dalliance of flirtation, that, too, is in the fitness of things, since men and women must flirt, make love, marry or jilt; and the only thing we have to ask of humanity is that it shall do these things with decorum and taste. It is just this sense of decorum, of taste, which is so conspicuous in the French of all classes, and so absent in the British Isles. And the only place where this decorum and taste fail them is at the public ball. Here they literally go off their heads, and become vulgar, gross, and indecent. Modest little _grisettes_ come to these vile rendezvous for the first time, well-mannered, timid, perhaps with some of the bloom of youth about them still, a reserve which might be interpreted as a kind of virtue,—such a pretty, engaging dignity does it give them,—and this they leave behind in the empty bowl of hot blue wine, with the slices of lemon or orange floating in it. They breathe the air of obscenity, and grow vain and audacious, believing this is life, and that they have learnt it. Inept and stupid rascals think it a grand thing to dye their souls in purple-black, and make a foolish mockery of all things sacred. Tenth-rate, vulgar-minded scribblers haunt these halls of horror, and pretend to prefer the popularity earned by their brutish impurities, couched in coarse verse, in such abodes of vice to that of the reading public. And when, by chance, you see printed, or hear one of those hymns of Montmartre of the glories of Bullier or the Moulin Rouge, it seems to you a proof of infallible justice on the part of contemporary judgment that these mediocre scoundrels should have failed.