The Louvre has always been the especial object of the hatred of the Parisian mob, and no wonder. Every stone laid was so much bread taken from the mouths of French workingmen; every stroke of a chisel, every inch of the wonderful pile, was a robbery of himself of whatever it cost. It was the habitation of a nobility, supported in luxury at the expense of the French people. It is all well enough to talk of reason, but there is no reason in a revolution. The Parisian whose wife and family were living in garrets and cellars, eating black bread and drinking sour wine, could not be reasoned with when he caught glimpses of the luxurious salons in which the few took their pleasure. He could not be expected to have much reason when he got a smell of the delicacies of the royal table, and thought of the scant fare on which he was compelled to subsist. His garret and thin pallet did not contrast well with the gorgeous apartments and silken couches of his royal masters, nor did the offal with which he was fed compare pleasantly with the wild profusion of dainties which they rioted upon. It was nightingale tongues _versus_ offal--it was poverty in the extreme _versus_ prodigal waste. And then the arrogance of these tyrants! They held the commoners as an inferior race, as another creation, much as the Southern planter used to hold his slaves. One of the ancient nobility replied to a demand from the workingmen for better food: "The animals! Let them eat grass!" It is no wonder, a few months later, when this silken lord was beheaded, that the mob carried his head upon a pike with a tuft of grass in his set jaws. It is no wonder that when the mob, starved and frozen to a point where death was preferable to life, wrested the power from the nobility and controlled Paris, that it should blindly destroy everything that symbolized royalty, everything that smacked of class rule. True, the Commune should not have destroyed fountains, and statuary, and paintings, but it must be said that they did not destroy these priceless works for the mere sake of destroying them. The statues symbolized royalty. It was not a Venus that was the object of their hatred--the Venus was their wrong, in stone. [Illustration: OF THE COMMUNE.] There is much to be said about these Parisian mobs, and whoever knows of the sufferings of the people, even under the mildest form of royalty, cannot wholly condemn. The many laboring for the few; the man with a hungry wife and pallid children does not care much for the art that his oppressors delight in. He looks at immortal work through eyes dimmed with suffering and half blinded with tears, and it is not singular that in his rage he strikes blindly. [Sidenote: THE COMMUNE.]