coffee-houses, the runners for gambling halls, adventurers, and
social outcasts, the runaway children or forlorn hopefuls of
literature, arts, and the bar, attorneys' clerks, students of the
institutions of higher learning, the curious, loungers, strangers,
and the occupants of furnished lodgings, these amounting, it is
said, to forty thousand in Paris. They fill the garden and the
galleries; "one would hardly find here one of what were called the
"Six Bodies,"[19] a bourgeois settled down and occupied with his own
affairs, a man whom business and family cares render serious and
influential. There is no place here for industrious and orderly
bees; it is the rendezvous of political and literary drones. They
flock into it from every quarter of Paris, and the tumultuous,
buzzing swarm covers the ground like an overturned hive. "Ten
thousand people," writes Arthur Young,[20] "have been all this day
in the Palais-Royal;" the press is so great that an apple thrown
from a balcony on the moving floor of heads would not reach the
ground. The condition of these heads may be imagined; they are
emptier of ballast than any in France, the most inflated with
speculative ideas, the most excitable and the most excited. In this
pell-mell of improvised politicians no one knows who is speaking;
nobody is responsible for what he says. Each is there as in the
theater, unknown among the unknown, requiring sensational
impressions and strong emotions, a prey to the contagion of the
passions around him, borne along in the whirl of sounding phrases,
of ready-made news, growing rumors, and other exaggerations by which
fanatics keep outdoing each other. There are shouting, tears,
applause, stamping and clapping, as at the performance of a tragedy;
one or another individual becomes so inflamed and hoarse that he
dies on the spot with fever and exhaustion. In vain has Arthur
Young been accustomed to the tumult of political liberty; he is