While the Terror lasted, the Palais Royal remained untenanted. After the Restoration it was occupied by Louis Philippe while Duke of Orleans; when the son of Egalité called himself to the throne of his nephew, he forsook it for the Tuileries, and during the remainder of his reign it was open to the public as an historical monument and museum. On the resurrection of the Empire, the Palais Royal became the residence of Prince Jerome Bonaparte, only surviving brother of Napoleon I. When this last venerable twig fell from the old imperial tree, it continued in the possession of his son, Prince Napoleon. Hither, in March, 1859, he brought his young bride, the Princess Clothilde, daughter of Victor Emmanuel, and there he resided until the memorable summer of 1870, when the disastrous war with Prussia came like a cyclone, and tore up the old tree by the roots, and sent the branches flying hither and thither over the astonished face of Europe. The Commune closes our retrospect of Richelieu’s palace. The Tuileries and the Palais Royal sent up their petroleum flames together to the soft summer skies where the bright May sun was shining down, serenely sad, upon the awful spectacle of Paris on fire—a funeral pile whereon were consumed, let us hope never again to rise from their ashes, the Commune itself, and the delusions of the few honest fools, if such there were, who believed in its insane theories. Surely as they fled, scared from their old historic haunts by the blaze and stench of the devilish modern fluid, the ghosts of Richelieu, and Mazarin, and Anne of Austria, and all that band of majestic figures from the unburied past, must have laughed a bitter laugh, wherein horror was not without a note of triumph, as they looked back upon the ghastly scene. “Our little systems had their day,” the dead legislators may have said, one to another, as they stood in the lurid light of the conflagration that illuminated, to the eyes of their disembodied spirit, the far-stretching vistas of the present and the past; “they were all faulty, how faulty we know now with unavailing knowledge, but, compared to this, were they not the Millennium, Eutopia, the ideal of the reign of justice upon the earth?” AN ABUSE OF DIPLOMATIC AUTHORITY.