We are left to imagine the feelings with which he contemplated the regenerated capital of the Republic. He had last lived there in 1792, when equality and fraternity were expressing themselves with such ungraceful logic. The Revolution was now spent. Equality and fraternity were forgotten; liberty was construed in a sense that made even the liberal shudder. The Paris that had issued from the womb of the Revolution, with such fangs as of a giant offspring, was a grotesque abortion. The poor were as poor as ever, as despised as ever, as much preyed on by parasites as ever. But the new class that filled the theatres and the larger houses was insufferable. An epidemic of speculation had set in. Brokers and bankers met you at every corner, and shrill females assailed you in the streets with bundles of notes. The paper-money of the successive authorities and the confiscation of ecclesiastical and emigrant property had led to these spectacles. Some won the prizes, and, if they succeeded in carrying their money beyond the “camp of Tartars” at the Palais Egalité, bought emigrant hotels and entered “Society”—a society such as the world has rarely seen. The frequent mention of freedom during the last few years had led to a study of the life of the “free peoples of antiquity,” which rested on slavery. Sonorous Greek and Latin names decorated the new generation. Greek and Roman garments hung about their slim Parisian persons. The men got the idea that the _hetairæ_ were the chief feature of classic life: and the women thought it was the use of transparent dress—though it is gratifying to learn that some of them were hooted when they attempted to walk the Bois in this costume. Wealthy brokers built Roman homes, not forgetting the fish ponds, for their _amies_. The journals announced as many divorces as marriages. What with war and guillotine and pike the multiplication of patriots had become urgently necessary, and the only qualification for fraternity was patriotism; they had long before anticipated Mr. G. Bernard Shaw, and proposed to supply such as the Abbé Fauchet with a harem of twenty healthy _citoyennes_. Actresses and adventuresses and ex-nuns were fought for by men who had made fortunes on flour or paper-money, or emigrant property, and clothed with the wardrobes of dead princesses, and reopened the salons of the old regime; the furniture, decorations, and social forms not a little confused. At table they ate and drank much, and talked little. Balls, especially fancy dress balls, were held daily, transparent trousers and the light costume of heathen goddesses not being prohibited in an age of liberty. Churches and convents had been turned into restaurants and dancing-rooms for the most part.