It is easy to see how strong the feeling is against the aristocratic class. Nor is it much to be wondered at! The aristocracy seem to try to make themselves unpopular. They detest the republic, which has shorn them of their splendor, and do everything in their power (socially and diplomatically their power is still great) to interfere with and frustrate the plans of the government. Only last year they seized an opportunity at the funerals of the Duchesse d'Alencon and the Duc d'Aumale to make a royalist manifestation of the most pronounced character. The young Duchesse d'Orleans was publicly spoken of and treated as the "Queen of France;" at the private receptions given during her stay in Paris the same ceremonial was observed as if she had been really on the throne. The young Duke, her husband, was not present, being in exile as a pretender, but armorial bearings of the "reigning family," as their followers insist on calling them, were hung around the Madeleine and on the funeral-cars of both the illustrious dead. The government is singularly lenient to the aristocrats. If a poor man cries "Long live the Commune!" in the street, he is arrested. The police, however, stood quietly by and let a group of the old nobility shout "Long live the Queen!" as the train containing the young Duchesse d'Orleans moved out of the station. The secret of this leniency toward the "pretenders" to the throne, is that they are very little feared. If it amuses a set of wealthy people to play at holding a court, the strong government of the republic cares not one jot. The Orleans family have never been popular in France, and the young pretender's marriage to an Austrian Archduchess last year has not improved matters. It is the fashion in the conservative Faubourg St. Germain, to ridicule the President, his wife and their bourgeois surroundings, as forty years ago the parents of these aristocrats affected to despise the imperial _parvenus_. The swells amused themselves during the official visit of the Emperor and Empress of Russia last year (which was gall and wormwood to them) by exaggerating and repeating all the small slips in etiquette that the President, an intelligent, but simple-mannered gentleman, was supposed to have made during the sojourn of his imperial guests.