The sumptuous ordinance of Marshal MacMahon’s household was rendered necessary in a manner by the Shah of Persia’s visit to Paris in 1873. It is a pity that M. Thiers was not in office when this constellated savage came to ravish the courts of civilized Europe by his diamonds and his haughtily brutish manners, for it would have been curious to see the little man instructing the Shah, through an interpreter, as to Persian history or the etymology of Oriental languages. In the Marshal, however, Nasr-ed-Din found a host who exhibited just the right sort of dignity; and all the hospitalities given to the Shah both at Versailles and Paris—the torchlight procession of soldiers, the gala performance at the opera, the banquet at the Galerie des Glaces—were carried out on a scale that could not have been excelled if there had been an emperor on the throne. In the course of the banquet at Versailles the Shah turned to the Duchess of Magenta and asked her in a few words of French, which he must have carefully rehearsed beforehand, why her husband did not set up as emperor. The Duchess parried the question with a smile; but perhaps the idea was not so far from her thoughts as she would have had people imagine. It was a really comical freak of fortune that brought M. Jules Grévy to succeed Marshal MacMahon. The story goes that during the street fighting of the Revolution of 1830, a law-student was kicked by one of the king’s officers, for tearing down a copy of the ordinances placarded on a wall. The officer was armed, the student was not; so the latter ran away and lived to fight another day. For the officer, as it is said, was Patrice de MacMahon, and the law-student Jules Grévy. M. Grévy is a man of talent and great moral courage, but he owes his rise to an uncommon faculty for holding his tongue at the right moment. “I kept silent, and it was grief to me,” says the Psalmist. M. Grévy may have felt like other people at times, an almost incomparable longing to say foolish things; but having bridled his tongue he was accounted wiser than many who had spoken wisely. Under the empire he practiced at the bar, continued to make money, was elected in his turn _bâtonnier_, or chief bencher as we might say, to the Order of Advocates, and in 1868 was returned to the Corps Législatif by his old electors of the Jura—in which department he had by this time acquired a pretty large landed estate. A neat, creaseless sort of man, with a bald head, a shaven chin and closely-trimmed whiskers, he looked eminently respectable. The only reprehensible things about him were his hat and his hands. He always wore a wide-awake instead of the orthodox chimney-pot, and he eschewed gloves. If his hands were cold he put them into the pockets of his pantaloons. Some pretended to descry astuteness in this contempt for the usages of civilized man, for the wide-awake is more of a radical head-dress than a silk hat. But it never occurred to M.