The French Republic dying of Gas.—­Good Sense for Gambetta.  TOURS,
SIXTH WEEK OF THE REPUBLIC, 1870.

Dear PUNCHINELLO: 

There is gloom everywhere; applications to serve in the ranks have diminished, and the price of pocket-handkerchiefs has increased.  JULES FAVRE writes, under cover of confidence, to the prefect here, that since the interview of which I gave you an account he has had a severe attack of gumboils, and despairs of softening the heart of BISMARCK.  I stole the letter for the purpose of copying it, but it was stolen from me in turn by a nefarious emissary of the London Times, who has not however, dared to use it.  The greatest activity is manifested in the making of balloons.  The administration labors under the delusion that gas and oiled silk may yet prove the Palladium of French liberty.  I have remonstrated unavailingiy against this singular infatuation.  I held up to the Rump Council now sitting in this city the example of VICTOR HUGO as a fearful warning.  He came from Guernsey under a pressure of gas; he entered Paris with the volatile essence oozing from every hair on his head; he loaded the artillery of his rhetoric with gas; he blazed, away at the Germans with gas, and yet, unable to get rid of such afflatus fast enough, he exploded in the very midst of his pyrotechnics, and now lies high and dry on “this bank and shoal of time” like a venerable rhinoceros extinguished by its own snorting.  I am sorry to say it, but the great peril of France at this moment is gas.  Touching GAMBETTA.  Ah! yes, touching GAMBETTA.  You may have heard that he has issued a proclamation or two.  There are depths in the soul of a Frenchman, where the inspiration of mighty words breeds like “flies in the shambles.”  Such a soul has GAMBETTA.  He is all language.  If you were to cut him up in little bits and put each atom under a microscope, you would find in every molecule the text of some proclamation.  The genii of syntax and prosody are his guardian angels, and the love of “gabble” is the be-all and the end-all of his political existence.  He loves not GARIBALDI.  He would have done violence to his grandmother rather than consent to the invitation of the Italian liberator.  For short, he calls him “GARRY.”  Standing in front of the Hotel de Ville, talking to a group of eager listeners, with his arms wildly gesticulating and his nose contemptuously curling towards the empyrean, he asks: 

“Who is this GARRY?  What is he?  Why is he—?”

“Stop,” I calmly interpollate, “profane not the high calling of the Italian hero with frivolous conundrums.”

“Jerk that monster out of my sight!” roared GAMBETTA to a sergent de ville, and pointing his long, skinny fore-finger full at me.

I turned mournfully upon the crowd, and asked in a plaintive tone:—­

“You hear what he says.  Do lunatic asylums exist in vain?  Men of Tours, is there a ‘jerkist’ among you?”