The Assembly returned to Paris on Thursday, the Chamber sitting
in the Palais Bourbon, and the Senate in the Luxem- bourg. M. Gambetta, in his opening address, adverted to the change, and said that the seat of Government had now been placed "at the only point of the territory whence one governs with authority." Paris is still "the head and heart of France," and "the nation has confidence in its patriotic population."
The great tasks undertaken by you in scholastic, financial, economic, military, and political reforms are about to derive a fresh impulse from your residence in this marvellous laboratory of Paris, where all the intellectual resources accumulate, whither flow all the living forces of society, all the data of internal and external policy, made fruitful by a public spirit, the vivacity of which does not impair its judgment or good-sense." That is a little Hugoish, but it is believed in France, and is so far true, that the Versailles arrangement did not work. The Deputies would not live out of Paris, and the return of the Assembly became therefore inevitable, After all, when Louis XVI. was overthrown the monarch lived at Versailles, and when Charles X. fled it was from St. Cloud.
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