always with child, has desires of irresistible fury. Paris is the
crown of the world, a brain which perishes of genius and leads human
civilization; it is a great man, a perpetually creative artist, a
politician with second-sight who must of necessity have wrinkles on
his forehead, the vices of a great man, the fantasies of the artist,
and the politician's disillusions. Its physiognomy suggests the
evolution of good and evil, battle and victory; the moral combat of
'89, the clarion calls of which still re-echo in every corner of the
world; and also the downfall of 1814. Thus this city can no more be
moral, or cordial, or clean, than the engines which impel those proud
leviathans which you admire when they cleave the waves! Is not Paris a
sublime vessel laden with intelligence? Yes, her arms are one of those
oracles which fatality sometimes allows. The _City of Paris_ has her
great mast, all of bronze, carved with victories, and for watchman
--Napoleon. The barque may roll and pitch, but she cleaves the world,
illuminates it through the hundred mouths of her tribunes, ploughs the
seas of science, rides with full sail, cries from the height of her
tops, with the voice of her scientists and artists: "Onward, advance!
Follow me!" She carries a huge crew, which delights in adorning her
with fresh streamers. Boys and urchins laughing in the rigging;
ballast of heavy _bourgeoisie_; working-men and sailor-men touched
with tar; in her cabins the lucky passengers; elegant midshipmen smoke
their cigars leaning over the bulwarks; then, on the deck, her
soldiers, innovators or ambitious, would accost every fresh shore, and
shooting out their bright lights upon it, ask for glory which is
pleasure, or for love which needs gold.

Thus the exorbitant movement of the proletariat, the corrupting
influence of the interests which consume the two middle classes, the
cruelties of the artist's thought, and the excessive pleasure which is