“Idiotic Frenchmen!” I exclaimed, in a voice that must have sounded like an echo working its way through a thick upper crust of doughy apple-dumplings; “Idiotic Frenchmen, do you know what you are doing?  Have you the feelings of a man, or of a mad dog?  Which is it that it is, that you should be worrying the life out of this croupy infant of liberty, as is hardly able to waggle its head, barring all hope that it will ever get upon its pins and take its ‘constitutional’ like other mortals in distress?  Where is the ghost of MIRABEAU, that it does not come upon you all of a sudden, to confiscate the very marrow in your bones and set up a candle factory in spite of the tax on tallow?  Where is LAFAYETTE?  Where is REGINALD DE LYLE?  Where is ROBESPIERRE and GEORGE FRANCIS TRAIN?  Where is the DUKE DE MONTEBELLO, or the Count of MONTE CHRISTO, that they don’t hang round you like aggravated wasps, and sting you into that appreciation of the fitness of things whereby some razor may be slipped across your wizzen, and Paris follow your corse to the Pere la Chaise with joy and gladness?  Why, in the name of all the torments—­”

I stopped for want of breath, in time to see that the crowd paid no attention, and that, to say the least of it, I had been making an ass of myself.  Not that there was no wisdom in my words, but these Frenchmen are the most “dog gorned” insensible people to right up and down, plain, everyday gospel truth that Providence ever permitted to play checkers with Destiny.  I had no hankering for a closer interview with FLOURENS.  He and I could never had got at a basis peace.  There is no harmony in the method of our mental “jointings.”  I would have given “stamps” to have got his head under a quiet village pump, but I wouldn’t have undertaken to reason with him for all the gold of the Credit Mobilier.  There is another creamy idiot, trying his “level best” to smash things here.  Look at him!  JULES VALLES! a patriot by name and a Pat-rioter by nature, with enough hair on his head to stuff a gabion, and not sense enough beneath it to accommodate a well-informed parrot.  These fellows call FAVRE a “milk-sop,” and the trouble of it is that FAYRE occasionally gives them reason for doing so.  Strolling through the Passage des Princes this morning, I saw TROCHU and accosted him.  “General,” I said, probably with some trifling vindictiveness in my heart, “isn’t there a grease vat in Paris sufficiently large to boil down Monsieur FLOURENS and his friends?” He might have thought that I was a little overheated, or that some of the Grand Cafe “tangle-foot” had got into my head; but his looks undeniably indicated that he did not regard this as an unusually cool proposal.  He simply said, “Oh my!” in tolerably good English, and then I continued: 

“You mistake me, General.  I was not born in New Zealand.  There is nothing of the cannibal about me, and I trust the supply of provisions in Paris won’t compel us to eat each other just yet; but if there is no satisfaction for the stomach in putting a tun or two of boiling fat around GUSTAVE FLOURENS, can you think of anything better calculated to produce serenity in the public mind?”