Much time he spent moodily gazing from the windows of his lodgings in the Rue St Honoré. Thence looking, his life seemed to become a dream of motley crowds always drifting by. Stolid, tight-buttoned guards, with brigand moustaches like dolls’; frowzy revolutionary conscripts, swaggering to glory; tattered deputations, exhibiting the seals of their memorials in the shape of old blood-stains dried upon arms and faces, and headed, perhaps, by some trimly arrogant sectional president, with his sleek hair and tricolour sash--vociferous or intent, in noisome clouds they floated by; and Ned could seldom rescue so much curiosity from the heart of his self-centred indifference as to inquire what was their destination or significance. A shoddy Paris--a Paris of gaudy fustian. So far a certain general impression seemed bitten into him; and, desultorily moved by it, he would rarely wake to a little rhapsodical song of lamentation over yet another shattered ideal. This city and this people that he had loved, and of which and whom he had expected and prophesied so noble a triumph of self-emancipation! Now the tangled mazes of “party” differences seemed designed only to render the central cause unattainable. Now, he would think, the history of their municipal government was always to be likened to the story of an iceberg--a story of top-heaviness periodically recurring--of base and summit exchanging positions again and again, the depths replacing the head, the head the depths. And did it signify, as in the iceberg, a steady attenuation, a bulk of force and grandeur constantly lessening? God save France, and exorcise the sluggard demon in Pierre-Victorin!