ed until the following
March.

When General Buonaparte reached Paris, and went to dwell in the mean
and shabby lodgings which his lean purse compelled him to choose, he
found the city strangely metamorphosed. Animated by a settled purpose
not to accept the position assigned to him in the Army of the West,
and, if necessary, to defy his military superiors, his humor put him
out of all sympathy with the prevalent gaiety. Bitter experience had
taught him that in civil war the consequences of victory and defeat
are alike inglorious. In the fickleness of public opinion the
avenging hero of to-day may easily become the reprobated outcast of
to-morrow. What reputation he had gained at Toulon was already
dissipated in part; the rest might easily be squandered entirely in
Vendee. He felt and said that he could wait. But how about his daily
bread?

The drawing-rooms of Paris had opened like magic before the "sesame"
of Thermidor and the prospects of settled order under the Directory.
There were visiting, dining, and dancing; dressing, flirtation, and
intrigue; walking, driving, and riding--all the avocations of a people
soured with the cruel and bloody past, and reasserting its native
passion for pleasure and refinement. All classes indulged in the
wildest speculation, securities public and corporate were the sport of
the exchange, the gambling spirit absorbed the energies of both sexes
in desperate games of skill and chance. The theaters, which had never
closed their doors even during the worst periods of terror, were
thronged from pit to gallery by a populace that reveled in excitement.
The morality of the hour was no better than the old; for there was a
strange mixture of elements in this new society. The men in power were
of every class--a few of the old aristocracy, many of the wealthy
burghers, a certain proportion of the colonial nabobs from the West
Indies and elsewhere, adventurers of every stripe, a few even of the
city populace, and some country common folk. The purchase and sale of
the confiscated lands, the national domain which furnished a slender
security for the national debt and depreciated bonds, had enriched
thousands of the vulgar sort. The newly rich lost their balance and
their stolidity, becoming as giddy and frivolous and aggressive as the
worst. The ingredients of this queer hodgepodge had yet to learn one
another's language and nature; the niceties of speech, gesture, and
mien which once had a well-un