another she
is dancing the Can-can, and throwing her petticoats over her head,
before King William, who is drinking champagne, seated on a sofa, while
her husband is in a cage hung up to the wall. These scandalous
caricatures have not even the merit of being funny, they are a
reflection upon French chivalry, and on that of Trochu. What would he
say if the Government which succeeds him were to allow his own wife to
be insulted in this cowardly manner?

Anything more dreary than the Boulevards now in the evening it is
difficult to imagine. Only one street lamp in three is lighted, and the
_cafes_, which close at 10.30, are put on half-allowance of gas. To mend
matters, everyone who likes is allowed to put up a shed on the side walk
to sell his goods, or to collect a crowd by playing a dirge on a fiddle.
The consequence is that the circulation is rendered almost impossible. I
suggested to a high authority that the police ought at least to
interfere to make these peripatetic musicians "move on," but he told me
that, were they to do so, they would be accused of being "Corsicans and
Reactionaries." These police are themselves most ludicrous objects;
anyone coming here would suppose that they are members of some new sect
of peripatetic philosophers; they walk about in pairs, arrayed in pea
jackets with large hoods; and when it is wet they have umbrellas. Their
business appears to be, never to interfere with the rights of their
fellow-citizens to do what they please, and, so helpless do they look,
that I believe if a child were to attack them, they would appeal to the
passers-by for protection.

I see in an English paper of the 3rd that it is believed at Versailles
that we have only fresh meat for twelve days. We are not so badly off as
that. How many oxen and cows there still are I do not know; a few days
ago, however, I counted myself 1,500 in a large pen. The newspapers
calculate that at the commencement of the siege there were 100,000
horses in Paris, and that there are now 70,000; 30,000 will be enough
for the army, consequently 40,000 can be eaten. The amount of meat on
each horse averages 500 lb., consequently we have twenty million pounds
of fresh horse-flesh, a quantity which will last us for more than three
months at the present rate of the meat consumption. These figures are, I
think, very much exaggerated. I should say that there are not more than
40,000 horses now in Paris. The _Petites Voitures_ (Cab) Company has