announced that the
sitting was over, and the public noisily withdrew. An attempt has been
made by the respectable portion of the community to establish a club at
the Porte St. Martin Theatre, where speakers of real eminence nightly
address audiences. I was there a few evenings ago, and heard A. Coquerel
and M. Lebueier, both Protestant pastors, deliver really excellent
speeches. The former is severe and demure, the latter a perfect
Boanerges. He frequently took up a chair and dashed it to the ground to
emphasise his words. This club is usually presided over by M. Cernuschi,
a banker, who was in bad odour with the Imperial Government for having
subscribed a large sum for the electoral campaign against the
Plebiscite. Another club is held at the Folies Bergeres, an old
concert-hall, something like the Alhambra. The principal orator here is
a certain Falcet, a burly athlete, who was, I believe, formerly a
professional wrestler. Here the quality of the speeches is poor, the
sentiments of the speakers mildly Republican. At the Club Montmartre the
president is M. Tony Reveillon, a journalist of some note. The assessors
are always elected. A person proposes himself, and the President puts
his name to the audience. Generally a dozen are rejected before the two
necessary to make the meeting in order are chosen. Every time I have
been there an old man--I am told an ex-professor in a girls' school--has
got up, and with great unction blessed the National Guards--the "heroic
defenders of our homes." Sometimes he is encored several times; and were
his audience to let him, I believe that he would continue blessing the
"heroic defenders" until the next morning. The old gentleman has a most
reverent air, and I should imagine in quiet times goes about as a blind
man with a dog. He was turned out of the school in which he was a
professor--a profane disbeliever in all virtue assures me--for being
rather too affectionate towards some of the girls. "I like little
girls--big ones, too," Artemus Ward used to say, and so it appears did
this worthy man. Besides the clubs which I have mentioned, there are
above 100 others. Most of them are kept going by the sous which are
collected for cannon, or some other vague object. Almost all are
usually crowded; the proceedings at most of them are more or less
disorderly; the resolutions carried more or less absurd, and the
speeches more or less bad. With the exception of the Protestant pastors,
and one or