la Belle Guillotine, who blithely led the quadrille d'honneur, with a Robespierre for consort, to music furnished gratis by the raucous throats of ragged sans- culottes. Instead of lords and ladies treading the stately minuet in Versailles saloons adorned with beauty roses, the bare feet of hungry men beat time to the fierce Carmagnole on Parisian pavements. It is not a little suggestive that the participants in this foolish fandango should have turned for inspiration to the court of Louis XV., whose debauchery and depravity, the historian declares, had not been paralleled since the year of Tiberius and Commodus--that the Bradley-Martin "function" should have been copied from the extravaganzas of a harlot! What glorious exemplars for New York's Four Hundred!--a dissolute king, and a woman thus apostrophized by Thomas Carlyle: "Thou unclean thing, what a course was thine: from that first truckle-bed, where thy mother bore thee to an unnamed father; forward, through lowest subterranean depths, and over highest sunlit heights of harlotdom and rascaldom--to the guillotine-axe, which shears away thy vainly whimpering head!" Of the 350 male revelers more than 100 were costumed as Louis XV., while but three considered Washington worthy of imitation. Was this the result of admiration in New York's "hupper sukkles" for this wretched Roi Faineant, or King Donothing, whose palace was a brothel, and whose harlots stripped his subjects of their paltry earnings and left them to perish? Louis XV., who permitted his country to be wined, its revenues squandered, its provinces lost, and half-a-million men sent to an untimely death that a prostitute might be revenged for an epigram! Is that the kind of man our money lords admire? Louis lived until the fleur-de-lis of France was struck down in every land and dishonored on every sea, then died, deserted by his drabs, cursed by his country, and was consigned to the grave and the devil as unceremoniously as though he were a dead dog! And now more than one hundred men who have stripped the people to enhance the splendor of palaces, don the royal robes of this godless rake and do homage to bogus DuBarrys! Small wonder that Dr. Rainsford feared such colossal impudence might serve to remind Americans how France got rid of royalty; might evoke a hoarse growl from the many-headed monster; might cause some "dangerous demagogue" to stir--perchance a Danton! Fit patron saint for our own plutocracy is this swinish king, once called Bien aime, the Well-beloved; but after some thirty years of Bradley-Martinism, named Ame de boue--A soul of mud! How much our super-select society resembles the Madame DuBarrys, the Duc d'Aiguillons and Abbe Terrays, who made the court of Louis a byword and a reproach, his reign a crime, himself a hissing and a shaking of the head of the nations!