But the agitators are already in permanent session. The Palais-Royal is an open-air club where, all day and even far into the night, one excites the other and urges on the crowd to blows. In this enclosure, protected by the privileges of the House of Orleans, the police dare not enter. Speech is free, and the public who avail themselves of this freedom seem purposely chosen to abuse it.--The public and the place are adapted to each other.[1218] The Palais-Royal, the center of prostitution, of play, of idleness, and of pamphlets, attracts the whole of that uprooted population which floats about in a great city, and which, without occupation or home, lives only for curiosity or for pleasure--the frequenters of the coffee-houses, the runners for gambling halls, adventurers, and social outcasts, the runaway children or forlorn hopefuls of literature, arts, and the bar, attorneys' clerks, students of the institutions of higher learning, the curious, loungers, strangers, and the occupants of furnished lodgings, these amounting, it is said, to forty thousand in Paris. They fill the garden and the galleries; "one would hardly find here one of what were called the "Six Bodies,"[1219] a bourgeois settled down and occupied with his own affairs, a man whom business and family cares render serious and influential. There is no place here for industrious and orderly bees; it is the rendezvous of political and literary drones. They flock into it from every quarter of Paris, and the tumultuous, buzzing swarm covers the ground like an overturned hive. "Ten thousand people," writes Arthur Young,[1220] "have been all this day in the Palais-Royal;" the press is so great that an apple thrown from a balcony on the moving floor of heads would not reach the ground. The condition of these heads may be imagined; they are emptier of ballast than any in France, the most inflated with speculative ideas, the most excitable and the most excited. In this pell-mell of improvised politicians no one knows who is speaking; nobody is responsible for what he says. Each is there as in the theater, unknown among the unknown, requiring sensational impressions and strong emotions, a prey to the contagion of the passions around him, borne along in the whirl of sounding phrases, of ready-made news, growing rumors, and other exaggerations by which fanatics keep outdoing each other. There are shouting, tears, applause, stamping and clapping, as at the performance of a tragedy; one or another individual becomes so inflamed and hoarse that he dies on the spot with fever and exhaustion. In vain has Arthur Young been accustomed to the tumult of political liberty; he is dumb-founded at what he sees.[1221] According to him, the excitement is "incredible. . . . We think sometimes that Debrett's or Stockdale's shops at London are crowded; but they are mere deserts compared to Desenne's and some others here, in which one can scarcely squeeze from the door to the counter. . . . Every hour produces