ll re-echo in every corner of the world; and also the downfall of
1814. Thus this city can no more be moral, or cordial, or clean, than
the engines which impel those proud leviathans which you admire
when they cleave the waves! Is not Paris a sublime vessel laden with
intelligence? Yes, her arms are one of those oracles which fatality
sometimes allows. The _City of Paris_ has her great mast, all of bronze,
carved with victories, and for watchman--Napoleon. The barque may roll
and pitch, but she cleaves the world, illuminates it through the hundred
mouths of her tribunes, ploughs the seas of science, rides with
full sail, cries from the height of her tops, with the voice of her
scientists and artists: "Onward, advance! Follow me!" She carries a
huge crew, which delights in adorning her with fresh streamers. Boys
and urchins laughing in the rigging; ballast of heavy _bourgeoisie_;
working-men and sailor-men touched with tar; in her cabins the lucky
passengers; elegant midshipmen smoke their cigars leaning over the
bulwarks; then, on the deck, her soldiers, innovators or ambitious,
would accost every fresh shore, and shooting out their bright lights
upon it, ask for glory which is pleasure, or for love which needs gold.

Thus the exorbitant movement of the proletariat, the corrupting
influence of the interests which consume the two middle classes, the
cruelties of the artist's thought, and the excessive pleasure which is
sought for incessantly by the great, explain the normal ugliness of
the Parisian physiognomy. It is only in the Orient that the human race
presents a magnificent figure, but that is an effect of the constant
calm affected by those profound philosophers with their long pipes,
their short legs, their square contour, who despise and hold activity
in horror, whilst in Paris the little and the great and the mediocre run
and leap and drive, whipped on by an inexorable goddess, Necessity--the
necessity for money, glory, and amusement. Thus, any face which is fresh
and graceful and reposeful, any really young face, is in Paris the most
extraordinary of exceptions; it is met with rarely. Should you see one
there, be sure it belongs either to a young and ardent ecclesiastic or
to some good abbe of forty with three chins; to a young girl of pure
life such as is brought up in certain middle-class families; to a mother
of twenty, still full of illusions, as she suckles her first-born; to a
young man newly embarked from