THE STATE OF PARIS.
LTO THE EDITOR OF THE “SPEOTATOE.1 SIR,—The following letter from a French friend, not engaged in politics, and in a position to form a good judgment, may interest
"Paris, August 15.
"For the last fifteen days life has not been life in Paris. Fits of fever, moral prostration, rage have alternated, to bring us now, I think, to a concentration of patriotic sentiment which will, I trust, save us from disaster. What a spectacle is this crumbling away of the Imperial power before a single reverse ! Mexico cost us three times as much blood and money as these three fights, but people remained then cold, divided, embittered against one another. Now, through incredible follies (treachery I do not admit) we have the enemy in France. After a few recriminations, amidst which 011ivier disappeared, the wretchedest assembly ever seen has taken a befitting attitude, and one begins to govern again with Heaven knows what ministers, but determined to get through the business anyhow, reserving for a future day to liquidate accounts for the times before the war. Four days ago, I thought the Republic was about to be proclaimed. At present, the idea of dethronement (dechianee) makes way at express speed through all classes,—I do not say through the popular ones, you know whether there can be any doubt about those in Paris,—but in the bourgeoisie, among the great mercantile men, in the Army of the Rhine itself ! Yes, men go forth to fight, perhaps to be once more beaten,—but afterwards t The municipal elections in all the communes, these two Sundays, carry us already far away from 011ivier'e idiotic plebiscite. A silence has fallen on the name of Napoleon ILL, more extraordinary for me than the Prussian victories. The man is dead ! dead civilly, imperially. I know not how and whither he will drag his old worn carcase, but for the last fifteen days his name has not been pronounced in the Chamber. Except in two despatches, in which it is said that he visited the can- tonments, he has been no more spoken of than the Pope. He was ignominiously deprived of the chief command with his Leboeuf, without one of his Deputies, one of his basest Senators, breathing a word in his favour. Ah ! let men say what they like of our faults, of our blunders, there is a France still, and when all the filth of the surface (lea ordures de la surface) shall have been swept away, when many a life shall have been crushed from Metz to the plains of Champagne, men will reach the solid strata of a France which shall be neither Prussian nor Napoleonian. There will, perhaps, be many a military disaster, many a political commotion,—who can see to-day what to-morrow will be ?—but more than ever I believe in France.
"Yet how time is being wasted ! No rifles ! no uniforms ! the Garde Mobile spending its time in making cartridges Imagine your Volunteers in our place, and then wonder that there should remain stone upon stone of the Tuileries ! Ah ! the French are said to be ungovernable, undisciplined 1 and yet for days the people had to remain breathless, -without three lines of official reports, knowing nothing of our reverses but from Berlin and London ! and yet our army, crushed and ground to powder beneath numbers, is steadily forming itself anew ! Surely we are not such sick men as I myself thought we were."
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