and Frenchmen noticed with surprise that the court had now, so to speak, scarcely anything French about it. Natives were left in the background, and foreigners were overwhelmed with attentions. The emperor surrounded himself with Englishmen and Germans; the empress patronized Americans, Spaniards, and Italians. Indeed, at one time, viz., while in Egypt and at the opening of the Suez Canal, the empress displayed marked want of courtesy, and even rudeness, to Frenchmen, although M. de Lesseps, the engineer of the canal, was her own cousin. The prodigality of the court of the Tuileries became the talk of Europe, and the splendor of the imperial receptions attracted visitors from all quarters of the globe. We may say with the Prince of Morocco "From the four corners of the earth they come. The Hyrcanian deserts, and the vasty wilds To stop the foreign spirits, but they come, Then a magnificent Palais d'Industrie arose on the Champ de Mars, and millions of francs were expended to make this "Exposition Universelle " a success. In 1867 Paris literally swarmed with foreigners of all ranks, from royalty to artisanship. Money circulated freely in Paris, and the Parisians were delighted; but the rest of France groaned under the additional heavy taxation necessary to maintain all this extravagance, and growled ominously at the imperial régime. Béranger, in one of his most popular lyrics, makes the grand-children of an old soldier ask questions about the great Napoleon: "Parlez nous de lui, grandpère; parlez nous de lui." But these same grand-children, now grown up under the third Napoleon, finding the comparison between the two unpleasant, now began to say of the latter-" ne parlez plus de lui!" The most flagitious peculation was practiced by officials of every grade. Enormous speculations were entered into by all classes, even by the imperial family, in the hope of obtaining means for keeping pace with the exorbitant demands of fashion, with its corresponding licentiousness; and ladies of the highest rank might be seen imitating the dress and manners of the demi monde. Duels, arising out of intrigues, were fought daily, and suicides, from losses at the gaming-table, were equally common. Baccarat was an invariable concomitant of every fashionable party, and the night usually wound up with it. The free use of absinthe and other deleterious stimulants added to the general excitement and dissipation. Paris became demoralized, one fatal symptom of which was the immoral and indecent nature of the pieces produced at the theatres; no play would go down unless highly seasoned with intrigue and adultery. It is no secret that the emperor himself indulged in both. Among the scandalous papers found in the Tuileries, after the flight of the empress, and subsequently published by order of the provisional government, are two from Mdlle. Marguerite Bellanger to the emperor, printed in fac-simile of her handwriting, which fully reveal the nature of his intimacy with her.* This curious volume is well worth the attention of the historian. It reveals the rottenness of the second empire, just as the recently published state papers of the first empire reveal the cruelty, mendacity, and selfishness of the first Napoleon. We approach the catastrophe. Corruption prevailed in every branch of the public service, especially in the military and naval departments. The army made a magnificent display at reviews and upon paper, and France was gratified at perceiving herself regarded as the leading military power in Europe. This was the fatal delusion into which even the emperor fell, and it was the cause of the Prussian war. France was now in a position to avenge herself for Leipsic and Waterloo, and to extricate herself from the false position which the Prussian victory over Austria, at Sadowa, had placed her in. The emperor at first tried to restore the equilibrium by diplomacy; he sought to acquire Luxemburg secretly from the *Papiers et Correspondance de la Famille Impériale, vol. 1, supplement. king of the Netherlands, but Bismarck proved too wily for him, and, after leading him on so as hopelessly to commit himself in the affair, turned round and published the correspondence. The emperor's position was humiliating; he thirsted for revenge, and Bismarck, thoroughly well informed of the condition of the French army, and of its unfitness to take the field, got up the Hohenzollern candidature for the Spanish throne. The bait took: the emperor, assured by his ministers that everything was ready, declared war "with a light heart." His subsequent delays, vacillation, and evident want of administrative ability precipitated the catastrophe, and, within seven weeks from the declaration of war, France was stricken down, he himself was a prisoner of war, and Eugenie and her son exiles. The second empire terminated as the first did, in a crushing military reverse and the occupation of France by foreign troops. The parallel, however, is not exactly just. In 1815 the Allies disarmed France and occupied the whole of the country, but without extorting from it any indemnity beyond the maintenance of 150,000 foreign troops for four years. But the German emperor exacted from her an indemnity of 5,000,000,000 francs, a sum unheard of for such a purpose in modern times, and he occupied only a portion of her territory. Paris, however, underwent in 1871 the humiliation of 1615, in seeing foreign, hostile troops defiling along the Champs Elysées. The parallelism between the first and second empires ceases with Sedan. The Bourbons reascended the throne of their ancestors in 1815, after the fall of Paris; but in 1870 the fall of the empire was succeeded by a republic (so-called), and what is yet to come no one can foresee. Notwithstanding the disasters and the demoralization of the second empire, France has in reality come out of it better than she did out of the first. The immorality of the latter was as great as that of the former. There was scarcely a public man or woman of the great Napoleon's court at whom the finger of scandal did not point. Even the much-beloved and admired empress Josephine was not an exception. In a volume of poems published before her divorce, a poem, relating to her, ends with these two lines: 66 Puis, suivant du hasard l'impulsion propice, Passa de lit en lit au rang d'Imperatrice." Another poem relative to the Bonaparte family makes the emperor utter the following quatrian respecting his brother Louis, whom he had compelled to marry Josephine's daughter, Hortense Beauharnais : "Son épouse d'ailleurs, qui fut d'abord la mienne. Car si je la farmais si bien, ce fut pour lui." The late emperor was the son of Queen Hortense; she had two other sons, older than he, by her husband, and she adopted a son of Count Arese. In her will she recommended Louis Napoleon to treat this youth as a brother. The author of Le Dernier des Napoléon seeks to make scandal out of this, but as the young Arese was the same age as Louis Napoleon, there seems to be but little ground for it. Hortense had enough said about her without this. But it is only fair to remark that the age itself was a licentious one. There was not a court in Europe wherein licentiousness was not openly practised at that time; the sons of George III., especially the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, were sad examples of debauchees; and as for the queen of Spain, the wife of Charles IV., who does not name her with disgust and "execrate Godey?" and there was Catherine II. of Russia, and the German princes generally. In this respect, then, more allowance can be made for the first empire than for the second; for the latter had before it the excellent example of Queen Victoria, of Leopold I. of Belgium, of the royal families of Prussia, Austria and Sweden, and, latterly, of Russia. And it is much to be regretted that the emperor of the French should have descended to such associates as Miss Howard and Mdlle. Bellanger, while his beautiful empress was adorning the Tuileries; but such is human weakness at times: it prefers "ways that are dark and tricks that are vain" to the straightforward path, which it finds irksome. There remain a few words to be said about the internal policy of the two empires. The detestable system of espionage prevailed in both. There were spies everywhere. The waiters at the hotels, the drivers of public conveyances, salesmen in stores, boatinen, scavengers, clerks, persons of all ranks and classes, nay, even ladies of high station, were secret agents of the police. No one was safe from denunciation as an enemy of the government. Arrests of suspected or known hostile parties were frequently made on trifling pretexts, and the arrested were often kept immured without communication with their friends until it pleased the minister of police to release them or bring them to trial. It is generally believed that many of the so-called attempts at assassination of the emperor were got up by the police in order to afford the government a pretext for maintaining a large military force, or to get rid of some objectionable individuals. The famous Pichegru and Georges Cadandals affair, and that of the Duke d'Enghien, in 1804, are said to have been of this class, and some of the émeutes in Paris under the second empire were the same. The late emperor professed to be the friend of the working classes; he always subscribed handsomely to institutions designed to benefit them, and he encouraged them to form associations for their own benefit. In fact, under his auspices the International Association was formed, but as soon as he found out the extent of its schemes he caused the leaders to be accused of combining for political purposes, and expelled the society from France. So with the numerous strikes which of late years have agitated France, many of which were at first encouraged by the emperor, but were subsequently put down by military force. Rightly or wrongly, the emperor has the credit of having acted on the whole with duplicity to the working classes. He has, however, the merit of having inaugurated the system of plebiscites, and of thereby establishing universal suffrage in France; and although, doubtless, these plebiscites were in a great measure adroitly manipulated to his advantage, owing to the ignorance and credulity of the mass of the |