minds at the
Tuileries. France ought to have driven them out yesterday. Don't you
see?"

They all violently interrupted her. What was up with her? Was she mad
about the emperor? Were people not happy? Was business doing badly?
Paris would never enjoy itself so thoroughly again.

Gaga was beside herself; she woke up and was very indignant.

"Be quiet! It's idiotic! You don't know what you're saying. I--I've seen
Louis Philippe's reign: it was full of beggars and misers, my dear.
And then came '48! Oh, it was a pretty disgusting business was their
republic! After February I was simply dying of starvation--yes, I, Gaga.
Oh, if only you'd been through it all you would go down on your knees
before the emperor, for he's been a father to us; yes, a father to us."

She had to be soothed but continued with pious fervor:

"O my God, do Thy best to give the emperor the victory. Preserve the
empire to us!"

They all repeated this aspiration, and Blanche confessed that she burned
candles for the emperor. Caroline had been smitten by him and for two
whole months had walked where he was likely to pass but had failed to
attract his attention. And with that the others burst forth into furious
denunciations of the Republicans and talked of exterminating them on
the frontiers so that Napoleon III, after having beaten the enemy, might
reign peacefully amid universal enjoyment.

"That dirty Bismarck--there's another cad for you!" Maria Blond
remarked.

"To think that I should have known him!" cried Simonne. "If only I
could have foreseen, I'm the one that would have put some poison in his
glass."

But Blanche, on whose heart the expulsion of her Prussian still weighed,
ventured to defend Bismarck. Perhaps he wasn't such a bad sort. To every
man his trade!

"You know," she added, "he adores women."

"What the hell has that got to do with us?" said Clarisse. "We don't
want to cuddle him, eh?"

"There's always too many men of that sort!" declared Louise Violaine
gravely. "It's better to do without 'em than to mix oneself up with such
monsters!"

And the discussion continued, and they stripped Bismarck, and, in her
Bonapartist zeal, each of them gave him a sounding kick, while Tatan
Nene kept saying:

"Bismarck! Why, they've simply driven me crazy with the chap! Oh, I hate
him! I didn't know that there Bismarck! One can't know everybody."

"Never mind," said Lea de Horn by way of conclusion, "that Bismarck will
give us a j