Of what is lighter, especially if it be light as wind, how much easier the freightage!  Non-Admiral Duke de Chartres (not yet d’Orleans or Egalite) flies to and fro across the Strait; importing English Fashions; this he, as hand-and-glove with an English Prince of Wales, is surely qualified to do.  Carriages and saddles; top-boots and redingotes, as we call riding-coats.  Nay the very mode of riding:  for now no man on a level with his age but will trot a l’Anglaise, rising in the stirrups; scornful of the old sitfast method, in which, according to Shakspeare, ‘butter and eggs’ go to market.  Also, he can urge the fervid wheels, this brave Chartres of ours; no whip in Paris is rasher and surer than the unprofessional one of Monseigneur.

Elf jokeis, we have seen; but see now real Yorkshire jockeys, and what they ride on, and train:  English racers for French Races.  These likewise we owe first (under the Providence of the Devil) to Monseigneur.  Prince d’Artois also has his stud of racers.  Prince d’Artois has withal the strangest horseleech:  a moonstruck, much-enduring individual, of Neuchatel in Switzerland,—­named Jean Paul Marat.  A problematic Chevalier d’Eon, now in petticoats, now in breeches, is no less problematic in London than in Paris; and causes bets and lawsuits.  Beautiful days of international communion!  Swindlery and Blackguardism have stretched hands across the Channel, and saluted mutually:  on the racecourse of Vincennes or Sablons, behold in English curricle-and-four, wafted glorious among the principalities and rascalities, an English Dr. Dodd, (Adelung, Geschichte der Menschlichen Narrheit, para Dodd.)—­for whom also the too early gallows gapes.

Duke de Chartres was a young Prince of great promise, as young Princes often are; which promise unfortunately has belied itself.  With the huge Orleans Property, with Duke de Penthievre for Father-in-law (and now the young Brother-in-law Lamballe killed by excesses),—­he will one day be the richest man in France.  Meanwhile, ’his hair is all falling out, his blood is quite spoiled,’—­by early transcendentalism of debauchery.  Carbuncles stud his face; dark studs on a ground of burnished copper.  A most signal failure, this young Prince!  The stuff prematurely burnt out of him:  little left but foul smoke and ashes of expiring sensualities:  what might have been Thought, Insight, and even Conduct, gone now, or fast going,—­to confused darkness, broken by bewildering dazzlements; to obstreperous crotchets; to activities which you may call semi-delirious, or even semi-galvanic!  Paris affects to laugh at his charioteering; but he heeds not such laughter.