reless yet never
vulgar, they expressed a prevailing sentiment of uneasy discontent,
a foreboding of some destined change in things established, without
defining the nature of such change, without saying whether it would be
for good or for evil. In his criticisms upon individuals, the writer
was guarded and moderate--the keenest-eyed censor of the press could
not have found a pretext for interference with expression of opinions so
polite. Of the Emperor these articles spoke little, but that little was
not disrespectful; yet, day after day, the articles contributed to sap
the Empire. All malcontents of every shade comprehended, as by a secret
of freemasonry, that in this journal they had an ally. Against religion
not a word was uttered, yet the enemies of religion bought that journal;
still, the friends of religion bought it too, for those articles
treated with irony the philosophers on paper who thought that their
contradictory crotchets could fuse themselves into any single Utopia, or
that any social edifice, hurriedly run up by the crazy few, could become
a permanent habitation for the turbulent many, without the clamps of a
creed.

The tone of these articles always corresponded with the title of
the journal,--"Common-sense." It was to common-sense that it
appealed,--appealed in the utterance of a man who disdained the subtle
theories, the vehement declamation, the credulous beliefs, or the
inflated bombast, which constitute so large a portion of the Parisian
press. The articles rather resembled certain organs of the English
press, which profess to be blinded by no enthusiasm for anybody or
anything, which find their sale in that sympathy with ill-nature to
which Huet ascribes the popularity of Tacitus, and, always quietly
undermining institutions with a covert sneer, never pretend to a spirit
of imagination so at variance with common-sense as a conjecture how the
institutions should be rebuilt or replaced.

Well, somehow or other the journal, as I was saying, hit the taste
of the Parisian public. It intimated, with the easy grace of an
unpremeditated agreeable talker, that French society in all its classes
was rotten; and each class was willing to believe that all the others
were rotten, and agreed that unless the others were reformed, there was
something very unsound in itself.

The ball at the Duchesse de Tarascon's was a brilliant event. The summer
was far advanced; many of the Parisian holiday-makers had retur