_coup d’état_, itinerant ladies were crying under my window, ‘_Demandez la_ Patrie—_Journal du soir—trente sous—Journal du soir_;’ and I remember witnessing, even in our sober London, in February 1848, how bald fathers of families paid large sums, and encountered bare-headed the unknown inclemencies of the night air, that they might learn the last news of Louis Philippe, and, if possible, be in at the death of the revolutionary Parisians. ‘Happy,’ says the sage, ‘are the people whose annals are vacant;’ but ‘woe! woe! woe!’ he might add, ‘to the wretched journalists that have to compose and sell leading articles therein.’ I am constrained to say that, even in England, this is not without its unfavourable influence on literary morals. Take in the _Times_, and you will see it assumed that every year ought to be an era. ‘The Government does nothing,’ is the indignant cry, and simple people in the country don’t know that this is merely a civilised _façon de parler_ for ‘I have nothing to say.’ Lord John Russell must alter the suffrage, that we may have something pleasant in our columns. I am afraid matters are worse here. The leading French journalist is, as you know, the celebrated Emile de Girardin, and, so far as I can learn anything about him, he is one of the most fickle politicians in existence. Since I have read the _Presse_ regularly, it has veered from every point of the compass well-nigh to every other—now for, now against, the revision of the constitution,—now lauding Louis Napoleon to the skies—now calling him plain M. Bonaparte, and insinuating that he had not two ideas, and was incapable of moral self-government—now connected with the Red party, now praising the majority; but all and each of these veerings and shiftings determined by one most simple and certain principle—to keep up the popular excitement, to maintain the gifted M. de Girardin at the head of it. Now a man who spends his life in stimulating excitement and convulsion is really a political incendiary; and however innocent and laudable his brother exiles may be, the old editor and founder of the _Presse_ is, as I believe, now only paying the legitimate penalty of systematic political _arson_.