of the Republic; but the bourgeoisie,
enriched by the public security and liberty of trade, desired only the
continuance of order and a somewhat more liberal administration of
public affairs. The condition of many parts of the city, as revealed by
a number of official investigations after the Revolution of 1848, was
indeed deplorable. "A third only of the working-classes live under
conditions approaching hygienic ones, the remainder are in a frightful
state; forty thousand men and six thousand women are lodged in Paris in
furnished houses which are for the greater part nothing but damp hovels,
scarcely ventilated, badly kept, containing chambers in which are eight
or ten beds pressed one against another, and in which several persons
sleep together in the same bed." The immediate effects of the opening of
Baron Haussmann's magnificent new boulevards were in many cases
disastrous for the workmen and for the poorer classes, who found
themselves compelled, by the destruction of their old lodgings, and the
increase in rents and daily expenses, to seek shelter in the suburbs,
and in the _quartiers eccentriques_; the Expositions Universelles also
served to increase permanently the cost of living, as they have always
done since, and in other cities than Paris. On the other hand, the cost
of clothing was considerably diminished, and the workingman was never so
well arrayed as in the first years of the Second Empire.

The dubious antecedents of the third Napoleon exposed him to even more
than the usual hatreds and perils of crowned heads, and the number of
plots against his life rivalled even those of the attempted
assassinations of Louis-Philippe, one of the most unlucky of sovereigns
in this respect. The Emperor has been accused of having been a member of
the Italian secret society of the Carbonari in his youth; the Italian
war of 1859 has been said to have been rendered imperative by his former
oaths, and the frightful affair of the Opera-house on the evening of
January 14, 1858, appears to have been the work of this political and
revolutionary society. On this gala night, Massol was to bid adieu to
the stage, and Madame Ristori was to appear in three acts of _Marie
Tudor_, followed by an act of _Guillaume Tell_ and a scene from the
_Muette_. The house was brilliantly illuminated, both the exterior and
the interior, and thronged by an eager audience waiting for the arrival
of the Emperor and the Empress; at half-past eight the