Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 105.djvu/117

108 Madame de Sévigné, the question turns on a choice between authorities; and M. de Cassagnac declines to consider his offence as a hanging matter, when he can hale in, as particeps criminis, every big wig, male or female, which diffused ambrosial glories throughout the palmy state of France.

In one of his essays M. de Cassagnac avows that he would not think of writing them at all, if he had only to repeat and confirm current opinions. Accordingly, in all of them lie is more or less a polemic. He grounds his very right to be heard, on the first that he has something to say which clashes with what is commonly received. Writing about the Abbé Lacordaire, he propounds and defends the highest of high church theories—to the logical as well as practical annihilation of "civil power." Writing about the Fêtes of July, he satirises, as our Drummond might do, the attempt to give them a religions character—observing that "Sabaoth means God of battles, not God of émeutes." Writing about what he considers a vulgar error, the identity of the human heart, the eternity of the moral sense, &c., he brings all his ingenuity and his reading to bear on the other side. When he writes about Paris, therefore, you may be sure he will not flatter, and wheedle, and fawn. There are plenty to do that. He adopts another tone. He comments on the fact, that when the government is not to the taste of the Parisians, they change it outright, and France has to put up with their new choice; and he records, with "affliction," the historical truth, that the city of Paris, which thus overrides the French nationality, has never shown a very fervid degree of patriotism; reminding her that, in the reign of Charles VI., she called in the English, and opened her gates to them; that in 1814, she opened her gates to the Russians, much to the astoundment of the emperor, who had said, on terminating his prodigious French campaign, that a city of 800,000 inhabitants was not to be entered in its own despite; that in 1815, she opened her gates to the Prussians; and that future chroniclers will tell how Paris has expelled the Bourbons, and restored them, by turns. Paris, he adds, has never but once sustained a siege; and that was when she held out against Henry IV., and with the Spaniard for her ally. Paris has only put to death one king; but then Paris has put to death nearly ten prévôts; which prove at least how impartial she is in her rage and fury. And indeed the rage of Paris is, says M. de Cassagnac, something very Homeric and thunderous. Emeutes are an endemic at Paris, just as the plague is at Cairo: you must not be surprised when you hear in the air the periodical roll of faubourg thunder; it is usually about the month of June or July that the malady breaks out, and it commonly lasts three days. Things have been going on in this way these thousand years past.

He revolts at the haughty contempt displayed by the public journals of Paris towards the rest of France. They talk, he complains, of the provinces, much as the Athenians used to talk of Bœotia. They give to ministerial intrigues an infinite superiority over the interests of agriculture, popular education, and provincial progress. A great country is managed without resistance, and, in order to be the more easily managed, is corrupted, by a city rife with "turbulent instincts," with "atheistic tendencies,"—a city teeming with thieves and prostitutes,—a city "choked up with a population without parallel in the world, having more than one bastard to its every three inhabitants, while one-fifth of its denizens is born in the hospital, and the half dies there." Great, M. de Cassagnac