at uprooted
population which floats about in a great city, and which, without
occupation or home, lives only for curiosity or for pleasure--the
frequenters of the coffee-houses, the runners for gambling halls,
adventurers, and social outcasts, the runaway children or forlorn
hopefuls of literature, arts, and the bar, attorneys' clerks, students
of the institutions of higher learning, the curious, loungers,
strangers, and the occupants of furnished lodgings, these amounting,
it is said, to forty thousand in Paris. They fill the garden and the
galleries; "one would hardly find here one of what were called the
"Six Bodies,"[1219] a bourgeois settled down and occupied with his
own affairs, a man whom business and family cares render serious and
influential. There is no place here for industrious and orderly bees; it
is the rendezvous of political and literary drones. They flock into it
from every quarter of Paris, and the tumultuous, buzzing swarm covers
the ground like an overturned hive. "Ten thousand people," writes Arthur
Young,[1220] "have been all this day in the Palais-Royal;" the press
is so great that an apple thrown from a balcony on the moving floor of
heads would not reach the ground. The condition of these heads may
be imagined; they are emptier of ballast than any in France, the
most inflated with speculative ideas, the most excitable and the most
excited. In this pell-mell of improvised politicians no one knows who
is speaking; nobody is responsible for what he says. Each is there as
in the theater, unknown among the unknown, requiring sensational
impressions and strong emotions, a prey to the contagion of the passions
around him, borne along in the whirl of sounding phrases, of ready-made
news, growing rumors, and other exaggerations by which fanatics keep
outdoing each other. There are shouting, tears, applause, stamping and
clapping, as at the performance of a tragedy; one or another individual
becomes so inflamed and hoarse that he dies on the spot with fever and
exhaustion. In vain has Arthur Young been accustomed to the tumult of
political liberty; he is dumb-founded at what he sees.[1221] According
to him, the excitement is "incredible. . . . We think sometimes that
Debrett's or Stockdale's shops at London are crowded; but they are mere
deserts compared to Desenne's and some others here, in which one can
scarcely squeeze from the door to the counter. . . . Every hour produces
its pamphlet; 13 came out t