s, these _quadrumanes_ set themselves to watch,
work, and suffer, to fast, sweat, and bestir them. Then, careless of the
future, greedy of pleasure, counting on their right arm as the painter
on his palette, lords for one day, they throw their money on Mondays
to the _cabarets_ which gird the town like a belt of mud, haunts of the
most shameless of the daughters of Venus, in which the periodical money
of this people, as ferocious in their pleasures as they are calm at
work, is squandered as it had been at play. For five days, then, there
is no repose for this laborious portion of Paris! It is given up to
actions which make it warped and rough, lean and pale, gush forth with a
thousand fits of creative energy. And then its pleasure, its repose,
are an exhausting debauch, swarthy and black with blows, white with
intoxication, or yellow with indigestion. It lasts but two days, but it
steals to-morrow's bread, the week's soup, the wife's dress, the child's
wretched rags. Men, born doubtless to be beautiful--for all creatures
have a relative beauty--are enrolled from their childhood beneath the
yoke of force, beneath the rule of the hammer, the chisel, the loom, and
have been promptly vulcanized. Is not Vulcan, with his hideousness and
his strength, the emblem of this strong and hideous nation--sublime
in its mechanical intelligence, patient in its season, and once in a
century terrible, inflammable as gunpowder, and ripe with brandy for
the madness of revolution, with wits enough, in fine, to take fire at
a captious word, which signifies to it always: Gold and Pleasure! If
we comprise in it all those who hold out their hands for an alms, for
lawful wages, or the five francs that are granted to every kind of
Parisian prostitution, in short, for all the money well or ill earned,
this people numbers three hundred thousand individuals. Were it not for
the _cabarets_, would not the Government be overturned every Tuesday?
Happily, by Tuesday, this people is glutted, sleeps off its pleasure, is
penniless, and returns to its labor, to dry bread, stimulated by a need
of material procreation, which has become a habit to it. None the
less, this people has its phenomenal virtues, its complete men, unknown
Napoleons, who are the type of its strength carried to its highest
expression, and sum up its social capacity in an existence wherein
thought and movement combine less to bring joy into it than to
neutralize the action of sorrow.

Cha