asses of operatives of every description throughout the whole capital
and its faubourgs, so that, within six hours, he can have in military
array an armed mass of one hundred thousand blouses upon the boulevards.
The workshops alone, he tells me, can furnish fifty thousand. The
rapidity with which he conveys intelligence through this immense army
and their utter subservience to his will and subordination to his orders
are all so wonderful that it is impossible to determine which is most
so. To control a Parisian populace has hitherto been deemed a chimera.
With M. Dantes it is an existing reality. Not an army in Europe is so
obedient or so prompt as his army of workmen. The secret is this--they
know him to be their friend. All over Paris are to be seen his
workshops, savings banks, hospitals and houses of industry and reform,
and, in the suburbs, his phalansteries and his model farms. That he has
the command of boundless wealth is certain; but whose it is, or whence
it comes, no one can divine; and never did man make use of boundless
wealth to attain his ends more wisely than he does! Why, I am told that
the pens of half the litterateurs and feuilletonists of Paris have for
years past been guided by his will and compensated from his purse to
accomplish his purposes. 'The Mysteries of Paris' and 'The Wandering
Jew' are but two of the triumphs of his policy. And his system of
philanthropy seems not bounded by France, but to embrace all Europe. The
Swiss Protestant and the Italian patriot have each felt his effective
sympathy as well as the French workman; and in the same manner as with
the operatives so has he obtained influence and weight with the National
Guard, and to such an extent that of the sixty thousand one-half would
obey his orders with greater alacrity than those of Jacqueminot himself.
I tell you, Messieurs, he is a magician!"

"Hush! hush!" cried Marrast; "he is entering now!"

"He pauses and looks around him!" said Louis Blanc.

"He looks for us; I will go to him!" remarked Flocon.

"He looks for his wife," replied Louis Blanc. "There, he catches her
eye. See how eagerly she flies to him!"

"That is the finest pair in Paris," remarked the journalist.

"And the most devoted," added Ledru Rollin. "They have been man and wife
for some time, it is said, and any one would take them for lovers at
this moment."

"Have they children?" asked Flocon.

"No; but M. Dantes has by a former wife a son and daughter