esent depression and extinguishment. These admissions appear on every
hand:--in _Le Temps_, of November 7, 1898, in its review of the second
volume of M. Samuel Denis's _Histoire contemporaine: La chute de
L'Empire_, we read: "The period comprised between the 15th of July,
1870, and the last months of the year 1875 is, perhaps, of all our
national history, the most fruitful in dramatic events. It is, without
any doubt, that which has for us all the keenest interest,--the most
poignant. The history of these days of mourning, it is what our fathers
did, with their tears and with their blood, and it is the history of
events which still oppress with all their weight our national life. It
is that which constitutes our malady; it is, that after twenty-eight
years, we are still the vanquished." The Duc de Broglie, in an article
in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, July 1, 1896, a review of the colonial
policy of the Third Republic between the years 1871 and 1896, a period
in which her ministers strove--with very doubtful success, he thinks--to
recover in some degree the prestige lost in the war and in the
subsequent check in Egypt, _vis-a-vis_ with England, sums up: "We are
not alone in bearing the heavy heritage of the war of 1870; all the
world has its part in the sentiment of general uneasiness, from which no
one escapes. It is the common condition, and even though France should
be the only one to suffer from it, the other peoples, still, should not
resign themselves to it without mortification.... Well! behold it
revived, this sombre right of conquest, in all its nakedness, in all its
rigor;--it has installed itself in the very centre, in the full light of
civilization, and all, statesmen as well as doctors of philosophy,
political and social, have bowed before it.... So long as this spectacle
lasts, a brand is imprinted upon the front of modern society like a
_memento homo_ which recalls to it that the progress with which it
flatters itself has purified only the surface and which notifies
democracy, so proud of its puissance, that it is only a dust of men, a
plaything, like all human things, of all the winds that blow of brute
strength or of fortune."

Some interesting details have recently appeared concerning the official
residence, the Tuileries, under the last of the French Empires. For the
commonplace furniture which they found there, the Emperor and the
Empress gradually substituted other, much more luxurious. His apartmen