All through this Faubourg St. Antoine, misery, poverty, vice, and crime go hand in hand, and the evidences of it stare one in the face from every side.  Here the people live who begin the revolutions.  Whenever there is anything of that kind to be done, they are always ready.  They take as much genuine pleasure in building a barricade as they do in cutting a throat or shoving a friend into the Seine.  It is these savage-looking ruffians who storm the splendid halls of the Tuileries occasionally, and swarm into Versailles when a king is to be called to account.

But they will build no more barricades, they will break no more soldiers’ heads with paving-stones.  Louis Napoleon has taken care of all that.  He is annihilating the crooked streets and building in their stead noble boulevards as straight as an arrow—­avenues which a cannon ball could traverse from end to end without meeting an obstruction more irresistible than the flesh and bones of men—­boulevards whose stately edifices will never afford refuges and plotting places for starving, discontented revolution breeders.  Five of these great thoroughfares radiate from one ample centre—­a centre which is exceedingly well adapted to the accommodation of heavy artillery.  The mobs used to riot there, but they must seek another rallying-place in future.  And this ingenious Napoleon paves the streets of his great cities with a smooth, compact composition of asphaltum and sand.  No more barricades of flagstones—­no more assaulting his Majesty’s troops with cobbles.  I cannot feel friendly toward my quondam fellow-American, Napoleon iii., especially at this time,—­[July, 1867.]—­when in fancy I see his credulous victim, Maximilian, lying stark and stiff in Mexico, and his maniac widow watching eagerly from her French asylum for the form that will never come—­but I do admire his nerve, his calm self-reliance, his shrewd good sense.

CHAPTER XVII.

We had a pleasant journey of it seaward again.  We found that for the three past nights our ship had been in a state of war.  The first night the sailors of a British ship, being happy with grog, came down on the pier and challenged our sailors to a free fight.  They accepted with alacrity, repaired to the pier, and gained—­their share of a drawn battle.  Several bruised and bloody members of both parties were carried off by the police and imprisoned until the following morning.  The next night the British boys came again to renew the fight, but our men had had strict orders to remain on board and out of sight.  They did so, and the besieging party grew noisy and more and more abusive as the fact became apparent (to them) that our men were afraid to come out.  They went away finally with a closing burst of ridicule and offensive epithets.  The third night they came again and were more obstreperous than ever.  They swaggered up and down the almost deserted pier, and hurled curses, obscenity, and stinging