Parisians could do for themselves. But another specialty, which very forcibly struck me, and which cannot be said to have been any survival of ways and habits obsolete on the other side of the Channel, was the remarkable manner in which the political life of the hour, with its emotions, opinions, and passions, was enacted, so to speak, on the stage of the streets, as a drama is presented on the boards of a theatre. Truly he who ran through the streets of Paris in those days might read, and indeed could not help reading, the reflection and the manifestation of the political divisions and passions which animated the reign of the _bourgeois_ king, and ended by destroying it. And in this respect the time of my first visit to Paris was a very interesting one. The Parisian world was, of course, divided into Monarchists and Republicans, the latter of whom laboured under the imputation, in some cases probably unjust, but in more entirely merited (as in certain other more modern instances), of being willing and ready to bring their theories into practice by perpetrating or conniving at any odious monstrosity of crime, violence and bloodshed. The Fieschi incident had recently enlightened the world on the justice of such accusations. But the Monarchists were more amusingly divided into “_Parceque_ Bourbon,” supporters of the existing _régime_, and “_Quoique_ Bourbon,” tolerators of it. The former, of course, would have preferred the white flag and Charles Dix; but failing the possibility of such a return to the old ways, were content to live under the rule of a sovereign, who, though not the legitimate monarch by right divine, was at least a scion of the old legitimate race. The “_Quoique_ Bourbon” partisans were the men who, denying all right to the throne save that which emanated from the will of the people, were yet Monarchists from their well-rooted dread of the intolerable evils which Republicanism had brought, and, as they were convinced, would bring again upon France, and were therefore contented to support the _bourgeois_ monarchy “although” the man on the throne was an undeniable Bourbon. But what made the streets, the boulevards, the Champs Elysées, and especially the Tuileries garden peculiarly amusing to a stranger, was the circumstance that the Parisians all got themselves up with strict attention to the recognised costume proper to their political party. The Legitimist, the “_Quoique Bourbon” bourgeois_, (very probably in the uniform of the then immensely popular National Guard) and the Republican in his appropriate bandit-shaped hat and coat with exaggeratedly large lappels, or draped picturesquely in the folds of a cloak, after a fashion borrowed from the other side of the Alps, were all distinguishable at a glance. It was then that deliciously graphic line (I forget who wrote it) “_Feignons à feindre à fin de mieux dissimuler_” was applied to characterise the conspirator-like attitudes it pleased these gentlemen to assume.