The wildest manifestation of the afternoon was in the Place de la Concorde, where an immense mob fell to dancing about the statue of Strasburg. Everybody knows the sullen threat with which that statue has been placarded for so many years. It runs ‘L. D. P. (the initials standing for “Ligue de Patriotes”) Qui Vive? La France. 1870–18—.’ When the prodigious noise created by the mob seemed at its highest, it was cloven, as it were, by a din still greater, and a solid phalanx of men forced a way into the already crowded square. In the centre of this phalanx twenty or thirty men marched, bearing a long ladder, the heads of many of them being thrust between the rungs. In the middle of the ladder was seated a working painter in a blue blouse. The man was literally wild with excitement, and was roaring ‘Quatre vingt douze’ to a sort of mad, improvised tune, in which the packed marchers about him joined with the fell stress of their lungs. In one hand the man flourished aloft a pot of red paint, with the contents of which he occasionally bedewed his unheeding companions, some of whom had playfully bedaubed their own and others’ features, so that they looked as if they had just come fresh from some scene of massacre. In the other hand the man held aloft a sheaf of brushes, and in an instant the vast crowd seized the motive of his presence there, and the meaning of the rhythmic repetition of ‘Quatre vingt douze!’ [Illustration: EXTRAORDINARY SCENE IN THE PLACE DE LA CONCORDE: THE MOB TEARING THE MOURNING EMBLEMS FROM THE STATUE OF STRASBURG. ]