seem alluring. But these names alone could not have sufficed to
circulate the new journal to the extent it had already reached. This was
due to the curiosity excited by leading articles of a style new to the
Parisian public, and of which the authorship defied conjecture. They
were signed Pierre Firmin,--supposed to be a _nom de plume_, as, that
name was utterly unknown in the world of letters. They affected the tone
of an impartial observer; they neither espoused nor attacked any
particular party; they laid down no abstract doctrines of government.
But somehow or other, in language terse yet familiar, sometimes careless
yet never vulgar, they expressed a prevailing sentiment of uneasy
discontent, a foreboding of some destined change in things established,
without defining the nature of such change, without saying whether it
would be for good or for evil. In his criticisms upon individuals, the
writer was guarded and moderate--the keenest-eyed censor of the press
could not have found a pretext for interference with expression of
opinions so polite. Of the Emperor these articles spoke little, but that
little was not disrespectful; yet, day after day, the articles
contributed to sap the Empire. All malcontents of every shade
comprehended, as by a secret of freemasonry, that in this journal they
had an ally. Against religion not a word was uttered, yet the enemies of
religion bought that journal; still, the friends of religion bought it
too, for those articles treated with irony the philosophers on paper who
thought that their contradictory crotchets could fuse themselves into any
single Utopia, or that any social edifice, hurriedly run up by the crazy
few, could become a permanent habitation for the turbulent many, without
the clamps of a creed.

The tone of these articles always corresponded with the title of the
journal,--"Common-sense." It was to common-sense that it appealed,--
appealed in the utterance of a man who disdained the subtle theories,