among its numbers. "Professor of barricading," was a title honored at
the Cafe de Seville, and one that they would willingly have had engraved
upon their visiting-cards. Observe that the instruction was only
theoretical; doubtless out of respect for the policemen, they could not
give entirely practical lessons to the future rioters who formed the
ground-work of the business. The master or doctor of civil war could not
go out with them, for instance, and practise in the Rue Drouot. But he
had one resource, one way of getting out of it; namely, dominoes. No!
you never would believe what a revolutionary appearance these inoffensive
mutton-bones took on under the seditious hands of the habitues of the
Cafe de Seville. These miniature pavements simulated upon the marble
table the subjugation of the most complicated of barricades, with all
sorts of bastions, redans, and counterscarps. It was something after the
fashion of the small models of war-ships that one sees in marine museums.
Any one, not in the secret, would have supposed that the "beards" simply
played dominoes. Not at all! They were pursuing a course of technical
insurrection. When they roared at the top of their lungs "Five on all
sides!" certain players seemed to order a general discharge, and they had
a way of saying, "I can not!" which evidently expressed the despair of a
combatant who has burned his last cartridge. A "beard" in glasses and a
stovepipe hat, who had been refused in his youth at the Ecole
Polytechnique, was frightful in the rapidity and mathematical precision
with which he added up in three minutes his barricade of dominoes. When
this man "blocked the six," you were transported in imagination to the
Rue Transnonain, or to the Cloitre St. Merry. It was terrible!

As to foreign politics, or the remodelling of the map of Europe, it was,
properly speaking, only sport and recreation to the "beards." It added
interest to the game, that was all. Is it not agreeable, when you are
preparing a discard, at the decisive moment, with one hundred at piquet,