dangers, and promoted a belief in a monarchical conspiracy.
The less well-informed sheets gave more precise information, told of
the seizure of fifty thousand guns, and the landing of Prince Crucho.
Feeling grew throughout the country, and the republican organs called
for the immediate meeting of Parliament. Paul Visire returned to
Paris, summoned his colleagues, held an important Cabinet Council, and
proclaimed through his agencies that a plot had been actually formed
against the national representation, but that the Prime Minister held
the threads of it in his hand, and that a judicial inquiry was about to
be opened.

He immediately ordered the arrest of thirty Socialists, and whilst
the entire country was acclaiming him as its saviour, baffling the
watchfulness of his six hundred detectives, he secretly took Eveline to
a little house near the Northern railway station, where they remained
until night. After their departure, the maid of their hotel, as she
was putting their room in order, saw seven little crosses traced by a
hairpin on the wall at the head of the bed.

That is all that Hippolyte Ceres obtained as a reward of his efforts.

IX. THE FINAL CONSEQUENCES

Jealousy is a virtue of democracies which preserves them from tyrants.
Deputies began to envy the Prime Minister his golden key. For a year his
domination over the beauteous Madame Ceres had been known to the whole
universe. The provinces, whither news and fashions only arrive after a
complete revolution of the earth round the sun, were at last informed of
the illegitimate loves of the Cabinet. The provinces preserve an austere
morality; women are more virtuous there than they are in the capital.

Various reasons have been alleged for this: Education, example,
simplicity of life. Professor Haddock asserts that this virtue of
provincial ladies is solely due to the fact that the heels of their
shoes are low. "A woman," said he, in a learned article in the
"Anthropological Review", "a woman attracts a civilized man in
proportion as her feet make an angle with the ground. If this angle is
as much as thirty-five degrees, the attraction becomes acute. For the
position of the feet upon the ground determines the whole carriage of
the body, and it results that provincial women, since they wear low
heels, are not very attractive, and preserve their virtue with ease."
These conclusions were not generally accepted. It was objected that
under the influence o