“If I were to select the spot in all the earth in which the good and evil of civilisation are most strikingly exhibited, in which the arts of life are carried to the highest perfection, and in which all pleasures, high and low, intellectual and sensual, are collected in the smallest space, I should certainly choose the Palais Royal.  It is the Covent Garden Piazza, the Paternoster Row, the Vauxhall, the Albion Tavern, the Burlington Arcade, the Crockford’s the Finish, the Athenaeum of Paris all in one.  Even now, when the first dazzling effect has passed off, I never traverse it without feeling bewildered by its magnificent variety.  As a great capital is a country in miniature, so the Palais Royal is a capital in miniature,—­an abstract and epitome of a vast community, exhibiting at a glance the politeness which adorns its higher ranks, the coarseness of its populace, and the vices and the misery which lie underneath its brilliant exterior.  Everything is there, and everybody.  Statesmen, wits, philosophers, beauties, dandies, blacklegs, adventurers, artists, idlers, the king and his court, beggars with matches crying for charity, wretched creatures dying of disease and want in garrets.  There is no condition of life which is not to be found in this gorgeous and fantastic Fairyland.”

Macaulay had excellent opportunities for seeing behind the scenes during the closing acts of the great drama that was being played out through those summer months.  The Duc de Broglie, then Prime Minister, treated him with marked attention, both as an Englishman of distinction, and as his father’s son.  He was much in the Chamber of Deputies, and witnessed that strange and pathetic historical revival when, after an interval of forty such years as mankind had never known before, the aged La Fayette again stood forth, in the character of a disinterested dictator, between the hostile classes of his fellow-countrymen.

“De La Fayette is so overwhelmed with work that I scarcely knew how to deliver even Brougham’s letter, which was a letter of business, and should have thought it absurd to send him Mackintosh’s, which was a mere letter of introduction, I fell in with an English acquaintance who told me that he had an appointment with La Fayette, and who undertook to deliver them both.  I accepted his offer, for, if I had left them with the porter, ten to one they would never have been opened.  I hear that hundreds of letters are lying in the lodge of the hotel.  Every Wednesday morning, from nine to eleven, La Fayette gives audience to anybody who wishes to speak with him; but about ten thousand people attend on these occasions, and fill, not only the house, but all the courtyard and half the street.  La Fayette is Commander in Chief of the National Guard of France.  The number of these troops in Paris alone is upwards of forty thousand.  The Government find a musket and bayonet; but the uniform, which costs about ten napoleons, the soldiers provide themselves.  All the shopkeepers are enrolled, and I cannot sufficiently admire their patriotism.  My landlord, Meurice, a man who, I suppose, has realised a million francs or more, is up one night in four with his firelock doing the duty of a common watchman.