ll rules, with an organized office, a
large china inkstand, stamped paper, verbal reports read and voted upon
at the beginning of each meeting; and, around a table covered with green
cloth, these professional instigators of the Cafe de Seville, these
teachers of insurrection, generously gave the country the benefit of the
practical experience that they had acquired in practising with the game
of dominoes.

The "beards" remaining in Paris were busied with employments more or
less considerable in the government, but did not do very much, the
offices in which they worked for France's salvation usually closed at
four o'clock, and they went as usual to take their appetizers at the
Cafe de Seville. It was there that Amedee met them again, and mixed anew
in their conversations, which now dwelt exclusively upon patriotic and
military subjects. These "beards" who would none of them have been able
to command "by the right flank" a platoon of artillery, had all at once
been endowed by some magical power with the genius of strategy. Every
evening, from five to seven, they fought a decisive battle upon each
marble table, sustained by the artillery of the iced decanter which
represented Mount Valerien, a glass of bitters, that is to say,
Vinoy's brigade, feigned to attack a saucer representing the Montretout
batteries; while the regular army and National Guard, symbolized by a
glass of vermouth and absinthe, were coming in solid masses from the
south, and marching straight into the heart of the enemy, the match-box.

There were scheming men among these "beards," and particularly terrible
inventors, who all had an infallible way of destroying at a blow
the Prussian army, and who accused General Trochu of treason, and of
refusing their offers, giving as a reason the old prejudices of military
laws among nations. One of these visionary people had formerly been
physician to a somnambulist, and took from his pocket--with his tobacco
and cigarette papers--a series of bottles labelled: cholera, yellow
fever, typhus fever, smallpox, etc., and proposed as a very simple thing
to go and spread these epidemics in all the German camps, by the aid of
a navigable balloon, which he had just invented the night before upon
going to bed. Amedee soon became tired of these braggarts and lunatics,
and no longer went to the Cafe de Seville. He lived alone and shut
himself up in his discouragement, and he had never perhaps had it weigh
more heavily upon hi