_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 Hôtel 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?