ield; and shortly after Napoleon's
accession to the throne, he granted him a pension. There can be no
possible mistake about the name, seeing that it was attested at the
trial subsequent to the fiasco before the Court of Peers.

The real fact is this: Gavarni, like Balzac, invented many names,
suggested in many instances by those of their friends and acquaintances,
or sometimes merely altered from those they had seen on signboards. The
great caricaturist had a friend in the Departement des Landes named
Badingo; about '38 he began his sketches of students and their
companions ("Etudiants et Etudiantes"), and in one of them a medical
student shows his lady-love an articulated skeleton.

"Look at this," says the former; "this is Eugenie, the former sweetheart
of Badinguet--that tall, fair girl who was so fond of _meringues_. He
has had her mounted for thirty-six francs."

The connection is very obvious; it only wanted one single wag to
remember the skit when Napoleon became engaged to Eugenie de Montijo. He
set the ball rolling, and the rest followed as a matter of course.

At the same time, Gavarni had not been half as original, as he imagined,
in the invention of the name. Badinguet was a character in a one-act
farce entitled "Le Mobilier de Rosine," played for the first time in
1828, at the Theatre Montansier; and there is a piece of an earlier date
even, in which Grassot played a character by the name of Badinguet. In
1848, there was a kind of Jules Vernesque piece at the Porte
Saint-Martin, in which Badinguet, a Parisian shopkeeper, starts with his
wife Euphemie for some distant island.

To return to Louis-Napoleon at the Hotel du Rhin, and my first glimpse
of him. I must own that I was disappointed with it. Though I had not the
slightest ground for expecting to see a fine man, I did not expect to
see so utterly an insignificant one, and badly dressed in the bargain.
On the evening in question, he wore a brown coat of a peculiar colour, a
green plush waistcoat, and a pair of yellowish trousers, the like of
which I have never seen on the legs of any one off the stage. And yet
Lord Normanby, and a good many more who have said that he looked every
inch a king, were not altogether wrong. There was a certain gracefulness
about him which owed absolutely nothing either to his tailor, his
barber, or his bootmaker. "The gracefulness of awkwardness" sounds
remarkably like an Irish bull, yet I can find no other term to descr