I was glad to leave that company of--patients, still uncertain of their fate,--hoping, yet pursued by their terror: peasants bitten by mad wolves in Siberia; women snapped at by their sulking lap-dogs in London; children from over the water who had been turned upon by the irritable Skye terrier; innocent victims torn by ill-conditioned curs at the doors of the friends they were meaning to visit,--all haunted by the same ghastly fear, all starting from sleep in the same nightmare. If canine rabies is a fearful subject to contemplate, there is a sadder and deeper significance in _rabies humana_; in that awful madness of the human race which is marked by a thirst for blood and a rage for destruction. The remembrance of such a distemper which has attacked mankind, especially mankind of the Parisian sub-species, came over me very strongly when I first revisited the Place Vendôme. I should have supposed that the last object upon which Parisians would, in their wildest frenzy, have laid violent hands would have been the column with the figure of Napoleon at its summit. We all know what happened in 1871. An artist, we should have thought, would be the last person to lead the iconoclasts in such an outrage. But M. Courbet has attained an immortality like that of Erostratus by the part he took in pulling down the column. It was restored in 1874. I do not question that the work of restoration was well done, but my eyes insisted on finding a fault in some of its lines which was probably in their own refracting media. Fifty years before an artist helped to overthrow the monument to the Emperor, a poet had apostrophized him in the bitterest satire since the days of Juvenal:-- "Encor Napoléon! encor sa grande image! Ah! que ce rude et dur guerrier Nous a couté de sang et de pleurs et d'outrage Pour quelques rameaux de laurier! * * * * * "Eh bien! dans tous ces jours d'abaissement, de peine, Pour tous ces outrages sans nom, Je n'ai jamais chargé qu'un être de ma haine,... Sois maudit, O Napoléon!"