However, the _Phocéen_ had been suspended the very day its chief editor was arrested. Rabbe was set free after a narrow escape of being assassinated by those terrible Marseillais Royalists who, during the early years of the Restoration, left behind them such wide traces of bloodshed. He went to Paris, where his two friends, Thiers and Mignet, had already won a high position in the hôtels of Laffite and of Talleyrand. If Rabbe had preserved the features of Apollo and the form of Antinous, he would have won all Parisian society by his charm of manner and his delightful winning mental attainments; but his mirror condemned him to seclusion more than ever. His sole, his only, friend was his pipe; Rabbe smoked incessantly. We have read the magnificent prose ode he addressed to his dagger; let us see how, in another style, he spoke to his pipe, or, rather, of his pipe. MA PIPE "Young man, light my pipe; light it and give it to me, so that I can chase away a little of the weariness of living, and give myself up to forgetfulness of everything, whilst this imbecile people, eager after gross emotions, hastens its steps towards the pompous ceremony of the Sacred-Heart in opulent and superstitious Marseilles. "I myself hate the multitude and its stupid excitement; I hate these fairs either sacred or profane, these festivals with all their cheating games, at the cost of which an unlucky people consents readily to forget the ills which overwhelm it; I hate these signs of servile respect which the duped crowd lavishes on those who deceive and oppress it; I hate that worship of error which absolves crime, afflicts innocence and drives the fanatic to murder by its inhuman doctrines of exclusiveness! "Let us forgive the dupes! All those who go to these festivals are promised pleasure. Unfortunate human beings! We pursue this alluring phantom along all kinds of roads. To be elsewhere than one is, to change place and affections, to leave the supportable for worse, to go after novelty upon novelty, to obtain one more sensation, to grow old, burdened with unsatisfied desires, to die finally without having lived, such is our destiny! "What do I myself look for at the bottom of thy little bowl, O my pipe! Like an alchemist, I am searching how to transmute the woes of the present into fleeting delights; I inhale thy smoke with hurried draughts in order to carry happy confusion to my brain, a quick delirium, that is preferable to cold reflection; I seek for sweet oblivion from what is, for the dream of what is not, and even for that which cannot be. "Thou makest me pay dear for thy easy consolations; the brain is possibly consumed and weakened by the daily repetition of these disordered emotions. Thought becomes idle, and the imagination runs riot from the habit of depicting such wandering agreeable fictions.