I saw a few days ago the young orphan of Menotti, who was hanged in Modena.  Nor is it long since I saw Senora Luisa de Torrijos, a poor deathly-pale lady, who quickly returned to Paris when she learned on the Spanish frontier the news of the execution of her husband and of his fifty-two companions in misfortune.  Ah!  I really pity Louis Philippe.

La Tribune, the organ of the openly declared Republican party, is pitiless as regards its royal enemy, and every day preaches the Republic.  The National, the most reckless and independent journal in France, has recently chimed in to the same air in a most surprising manner.  And terrible as an echo from the bloodiest days of the Convention sounded the speeches of those chiefs of the Societe des Amis du Peuple who were placed last week before the court of assizes, “accused of having conspired against the existing Government in order to overthrow it and establish a republic.”  They were acquitted by the jury, because they proved that they had in no way conspired, but had simply uttered their convictions publicly.  “Yes, we desire the overthrow of this feeble Government, we wish for a republic.”  Such was the refrain of all their speeches before the tribunal.

While on one side the serious Republicans draw the sword and growl with words of thunder, the Figaro flashes lightning, and laughs and swings its light lash most effectually.  It is inexhaustible in clever sayings as to “the best republic,” a phrase with which poor Lafayette is mocked, because he, as is well known, once embraced Louis Philippe before the Hotel de Ville and cried, “Vous etes la meilleure republique!” The Figaro recently remarked that we of course now require no republic, since we have seen the best.  And it also said as cruelly, in reference to the debates on the civil list, that “la meilleure republique coute quinze millions.”  The Republican party will never forgive Lafayette his blunder in advocating a king.  They reproach him with this, that he had known Louis Philippe long enough to be aware beforehand what was to be expected of him.  Lafayette is now ill—­malade de chagrin—­heart-sick.  All! the greatest heart of two worlds must feel bitterly the royal deception.  It was all in vain that he in the very beginning continually insisted on the Programme de l’Hotel de Ville, on the republican institutions with which the monarchy should be surrounded, and on similar promises.  But he was out-cried by the doctrinaire gossips and chatterers, who proved from the English history of 1688 that people in Paris in July, 1830, had fought simply to maintain the Charter, and that all their sacrifices and struggles had no other object than to replace the elder line of the Bourbons by the younger, just as all was finished in England by putting the House of Orange in place of the Stuarts.  Thiers, who does not think with this party, though he now acts as their spokesman, has of late given them a