ty-two being more
than sufficient!" The Rennes people have elected farmer Gerard, "a man
of natural sense and rectitude without any learning." He walks there
with solid step; unique, "in his rustic farmer-clothes;" which he will
wear always, careless of short-cloaks and costumes. The name Gerard,
or "Pere Gerard, Father Gerard," as they please to call him, will fly
far, borne about in endless banter, in Royalist satires, in Republican
Didactic Almanacks. As for the man Gerard, being asked once what he
did, after trial of it, candidly think of this Parlementary work,--"I
think," answered he, "that there are a good many scoundrels among us."
So walks Father Gerard, solid in his thick shoes, whithersoever bound.

And worthy Doctor Guillotin, whom we hoped to behold one other time?
If not here, the Doctor should be here, and we see him with the eye of
prophecy; for indeed the Parisian Deputies are all a little late.
Singular Guillotin, respectable practitioner: doomed by a satiric
destiny to the strangest immortal glory that ever kept obscure mortal
from his resting-place, the bosom of oblivion! Guillotin can improve
the ventilation of the Hall; in all cases of medical police and
_hygiene_ be a present aid: but greater far, he can produce his
'Report on the Penal Code,' and reveal therein a cunningly devised
Beheading Machine, which shall become famous and world-famous. This is
the product of Guillotin's endeavors, gained not without meditation
and reading; which product popular gratitude or levity christens by a
feminine derivative name, as if it were his daughter: _La Guillotine_!
"With my machine, Messieurs, I whisk off your head (vous fais sauter
la tete) in a twinkling, and you have no pain;"--whereat they all
laugh. Unfortunate Doctor! For two-and-twenty years he, unguillotined,
shall hear nothing but guillotine, see nothing but guillotine; then
dying, shall through long centuries wander, as it were, a disconsolate
ghost, on the wrong side of Styx and Lethe; his name like to outlive
Caesar's.

See Bailly, likewise of Paris, time-honored Historian of Astronomy
Ancient and Modern. Poor Bailly, how thy serenely beautiful
Philosophizing, with its soft moonshiny clearness and thinness, ends
in foul thick confusion--of Presidency, Mayorship, diplomatic
officiality, rabid Triviality, and the throat of everlasting Darkness!
Far was it to descend from the heavenly Galaxy to the _Drapeau Rouge_:
beside that fatal dung-heap, o