ds of thousands who enjoyed his kingly funeral
would have been equally entertained by a public execution.

In the French nature, as has been said, is implanted a keen zest for
excitement. The Frenchman is ravenous for the theatrical situation,--a
perfect gormandizer of the dramatic event. Whatever or whoever lacks
this gilded framework is neither remembered nor noted. The supply
invariably follows the demand; without spectators there would be no
spectacle,--just as there is no sound where there are no ears.

Any Frenchman, therefore, who has any theatrical novelty to offer,
whether as a political mountebank, or a bogus hero, or a peculiarly
atrocious crime, is sure of a large audience. For there is a wide
range of appreciation in that mercurial nature which, according to
Voltaire, is half monkey and half tiger.

The evident pleasure with which vast Parisian crowds view riots and
revolution and the various phases of alternate anarchy and absolutism
may be easily and naturally accepted by the actors in these living
dramas as tacit if not positive approval. The professional patriot
does not perform to empty seats, and the few hundred hired assassins
of the public peace and private liberty would be out of a job but for
the hundred thousand passive and more or less amused spectators who
scramble for the best places to witness and make merry over the show.

That this curious crowd is greatly swelled by what in other lands is
recognized as the gentler or softer sex increases its responsibility.
The civilization which has produced so many women of the heroic type,
so many of the nobler masculine brain and hand, has also generated a
vast brood which poisons the germs of human life and hands down
bigotry, intolerance, revengefulness, cruelty, and love of turbulence
and bloodshed from generation to generation.

Of the performers before this audience Jean Marot and his stalwart
companion found themselves particularly observed from their debut. The
red turban was conspicuous enough, and gave a theatrical aspect to the
man who wore it. There was that in his ensemble which recalled the
great Revolution and the scarcely less sanguinary conflicts of '71. By
his side and contrasting strangely with the coarse brute features of
this muscular humanity was the finely chiselled face of the student
under the rough cap of the workman. A picturesque pair, they were
greeted on all sides with all sorts of cries and comments:

"That red cap i