Ever yours,

N.W.  SENIOR.

[Footnote 1:  Republished in the Biographical Sketches.  Longmans:  1863.—­ED.]

[Footnote 2:  The letter to which this is an answer is not to be found,—­ED.]

[Footnote 3:  This letter is not to be found.—­ED.]

[Footnote 4:  Published in 1868.—­ED.]

[Footnote 5:  That of the Emperor.—­ED.]

CONVERSATIONS.

Paris, May 9,1853.—­I drank tea with the Tocquevilles.  Neither of them is well.

In February they were caught, on their journey from Tocqueville to Paris, by the bitter weather of the beginning of that month.  It produced rheumatism and then pleurisy with him, and inflammation of the bowels with her; and both are still suffering from the effects either of the disorder or of the remedies.

In the summer Paris will be too hot and Tocqueville too damp.  So they have taken a small house at St. Cyr, about a mile from Tours, where they hope for a tolerable climate, easy access to Paris, and the use of the fine library of the cathedral.  He entered eagerly on the Eastern question, and agreed on all points with Faucher; admitted the folly and rashness of the French, but deplored the over-caution which had led us to refuse interference, at least effectual interference, and to allow Turkey to sink into virtual subservience to Russia.

Paris, Tuesday, May 17.—­Tocqueville and I stood on my balcony, and looked along the Rue de Rivoli and the Place de la Concorde, swarming with equipages, and on the well-dressed crowds in the gardens below.  From the height in which we were placed all those apparently small objects, in incessant movement, looked like a gigantic ant-hill disturbed.

‘I never,’ said Tocqueville, ’have known Paris so animated or apparently so prosperous.  Much is to be attributed to the saving of the four previous years.  The parsimony of the Parisians ended in 1850; but the parsimony of the provinces, always great, and in unsettled times carried to actual avarice, lasted during the whole of the Republic.  Commercial persons tell me that the arrival of capital which comes up for investment from the provinces deranges all their calculations.  It is like the sudden burst of vegetation which you have seen during the last week.  We have passed suddenly from winter to summer.

‘I own,’ he continued, ’that it fills me with alarm.  Among the innumerable schemes that are afloat, some must be ill-founded, some must be swelled beyond their proper dimensions, and some may be mere swindles.  The city of Paris and the Government are spending 150,000,000_l_. in building in Paris.  This is almost as much as the fortifications cost.  It has always been said, and I believe with truth, that the revolutionary army of 1848 was mainly recruited from the 40,000 additional workmen whom the fortifications attracted from the country, and left without employment when they were finished.  When this enormous extra-expenditure is over, when the Louvre, and the new rue de Rivoli, and the Halles, and the street that is to run from the Hotel de Ville to the northern boundary of Paris, are completed—­that is to say, when a city has been built out of public money in two or three years—­what will become of the mass of discharged workmen?