triumph, as prisoners of war, 4 gamins, 3 women, and 1 Irishman loudly
protesting innocence, and shrieking "Murther!" So ended the first
inglorious rise against the plebiscite and the Empire, on the 14th of
May, 1870.


From Isaura Cicogna to Madame de Grantmesnil.
Saturday. May 21.

"I am still, dearest Eulalie, under the excitement of impressions wholly
new to me. I have this day witnessed one of those scenes which take us
out of our private life, not into the world of fiction, but of history,
in which we live as in the life of a nation. You know how intimate I
have become with Valerie Duplessis. She is in herself so charming in her
combination of petulant wilfulness and guileless _naivete_, that she
might sit as a model for one of your exquisite heroines. Her father, who
is in great favour at Court, had tickets for the _Salle des Etats_ of the
Louvre today--when, as the journals will tell you, the results of the
_plebiscite_ were formally announced to the Emperor--and I accompanied
him and Valerie. I felt, on entering the hall, as if I had been living
for months in an atmosphere of false rumours, for those I chiefly meet in
the circles of artists and men of letters, and the wits and _flaneurs_
who haunt such circles, are nearly all hostile to the Emperor. They
agree, at least, in asserting the decline of his popularity--the failure
of his intellectual powers; in predicting his downfall--deriding the
notion of a successor in his son. Well, I know not how to reconcile
these statements with the spectacle I have beheld to-day.

"In the chorus of acclamation amidst which the Emperor entered the hall,
it seemed as if one heard the voice of the France he had just appealed