Charles R. was, as I had supposed, connected with the “press,” a socialist, a believer in the perfectability of men—of Frenchmen at least—and, in theory, an organizer of Labor. At that time the “press” had no great liberty in France; but it had to the full as much as it deserved, whatever the interested, or those who know nothing of the matter, may say to the contrary. The French “press,” when it has had its way, has done little else than to overturn a government, without the power or the knowledge to set up another in its place. It is not best that children, or the unskillful, should be entrusted with edge-tools; and a people is to be educated, through long centuries, to a fitness for the enjoyment of civil liberty, as man is educated, through long years, to a fitness for becoming his own master. Such has been the pupilage of our ancestry; but such has not been the pupilage of the ancestry of the French. In France liberty is anarchy; and so it is upon the Continent, in Germany, in Italy, and the Peninsula; and he who thinks it is to be made otherwise in a day, might as well pour the contents of a library at a fool’s feet, and bid him rise learned. But Charles R. and his friends, among whom was Louis Blanc—who looked like a boy, as a boy indeed he was, who had achieved something beyond his years—and Ledru Rollin—the future leader of the Mountain, which he had neither the ability to protect, nor the courage to fall with—and Proudhon—the plausible corrupter of youth, who endeavored to persuade France that “property is theft”—thought much and talked much of the liberty of the “press,” until in the end they got it, and made such use of it as we all know. _A las la presse._ I heard that cry once, and thought it the most conservative and the best for France. Such was the atmosphere which Paqueta now breathed, and I sometimes thought that, for her soul’s health, it was no better than the servitude from which she had escaped. I saw her often during another month that I remained in Paris, and more than once with a deal of company at her rooms. She had grown to her husband’s intellect, conversed freely upon the lightest and gravest topics, and performed the duties of a hostess with an ease and propriety which flowed directly from her native good taste; it is so with French blood every where, and however small may be the proportion to the whole mass. Her husband was a brilliant feuilletonist; I had read something of his pen before seeing France; but he found more excellence in his wife than his imagination ever limned; and, as a proof of it, he himself told me that his friends said his articles had more heart in them since his marriage. CHAPTER III.