he had finished Bouglé took him up point by point, demolished him, and went on with his own exposition. This at his own meeting, called by his own Radical Party, to forward his candidature! When I left at 12:45 A. M. the meeting was still in progress. At a Socialist meeting an old Catholic, looking exactly like Napoleon III, was allowed to hold forth for several minutes from a chair, until the impatient audience howled him off. _Young normaliennes_, representing the suffrage movement, appeared at meetings of all the parties, and were given the platform to plead the cause of women as long as the crowd would listen. These young girls were treated exactly as men; there was no trace of either chivalry or vulgarity, the audience reacted directly and intensely to their ideas and not to them. The first impulse of a Frenchman actually seems to be, when he hears something he doesn’t like, not to stop the other fellow’s mouth, but to answer him, and not with a taunt, or disarming wit, but with an argument. In the Chamber of Deputies the same spirit prevailed. The only visible signs of parliamentary order were Deschanel’s clashing of his big bell and his despairing “Voulez-vous écouter! Voulez-vous écouter!” The speaker in the tribune held it as long as he was permitted by his hearers; his interrupter would himself be interrupted and would exchange words across the chamber while the official speaker looked resignedly on. The Left would go off as one man in violent explosions of wrath, shake their fists at the Center, call out epithets. Yet this was a dull session that I saw, only a matter of raising the pay of generals. Certainly the campaign of that election against the new Three Years’ Military Law seems very far away now. The crowd outside the Mairie of the Vᵐᵉ the night of the election shouting “A--Bas--Les-Trois-Ans,” in the same rhythmic way that the law-students a few weeks earlier had marched down rue St. Jacques yelling “Cail--laux--as-sassin!” knew no more than I how soon they would need this defence of more soldiers. The cheers of the crowd as the splendid cortege of the English sovereigns swept along the streets seem more important than they did to me at the time. Doumergue’s stand-pat ministry, with which my stay in Paris almost exactly coincided, and during which the income-tax, lay-instruction, and proportional representation issues slowly made progress, appears now in the light of a holding everything safe till the election was over, and the President could stem the tide of reaction against the new military laws. France was waiting for the blow to fall that might be mortal. On the first of May I was in Nîmes, delightful Southern city,--where gaunt Protestants gave out tracts in the cars, and newspapers devoted to bull-fighting graced the news-stands,--reading the big red posters of the socialist mayor, summoning all the workmen to leave off work and come out to celebrate the International. Indeed a foreign land!