bourgeois is, as a rule, a silly, pompous creature; very frequently, he
is mean and contemptible besides.

Here is a story for the truth of which I can vouch, and which shows him
in his true light. In the skirmish in which Lieutenant Winslow was
killed, some damage had been done to the inn at Schirlenhoff, where the
Baden officers were at breakfast when they were surprised by General de
Bernis and his men. The general had his foot already in the stirrup, and
was about to remove his prisoners, when Boniface made his appearance,
coolly asking to whom he was to present the bill for the breakage. The
general burst out laughing: "The losing party pays the damage as a
rule," he said, "but France is sufficiently rich to reverse the rule.
Here is double the amount of your bill."

A second story, equally authentic. A cable had been secretly laid on the
bed of the Seine between Paris and Havre, shortly before the siege. Two
small shopkeepers of St. Germain revealed the fact for a consideration
to the Germans, who had but very vague suspicions of it, and who
certainly did not know the land-bearings; one of the scoundrels was
caught after the siege, the other escaped. The one who was tried pleaded
poverty, and received a ridiculously small sentence. It transpired
afterwards that he was exceedingly well paid for his treachery, and that
he cheated his fellow-informer out of his share.

The contrast is more pleasant to dwell upon. There were hundreds of
obscure heroes, by which I do not mean those prepared to shed their
blood on the battle-field, but men with a sublime indifference to life,
courting the fate of a Ravaillac and a Balthazar Gerard. History would
have called them regicides, and perhaps ranked them with paid assassins
had they accomplished their purpose, would have held them up to the
scorn of posterity as bloodthirsty fanatics,--and history, for once in a
way, would have been wrong. In their reprehensible folly, they were more
estimable than the Jules Favres, the Gambettas who played at being the
saviours of the country, and who were only the saviours of their needy,
fellow political adventurers.

Apart from the former, there were the inventors of impossible schemes
for the instantaneous annihilation of the three hundred thousand Germans
around Paris,--inventors who supply the comic note in the otherwise
terrible drama,--inventors, who day by day besiege the Ministry for War,
and to whom, after all, the minister's c