Page:The Royal Family of France (Henry).djvu/74

 among sets of wild teachers and harsh zealots all over Europe, means a family of Punchinellos glittering with gold embroidery and of feathered Judies paid for their services rendered in enlivening the local trade of some used-up mart, or in performing before a swarm of aristocrats and plutocrats as white as powder and pomatum can make them? God forbid Royalty and monarchy ever came down to that!

Now it is an universally acknowledged fact that the French nation has never initiated a revolution by its own impulse. Every one knows that Louis le Débonnaire, Charles, surnamed the Bald, Charles le Gros, and Charles the Simple were deposed by the powerful nobles of the kingdom, and not by the people. We know that it was not the people who wished to raise Coucy to the throne of Saint Louis;—that it was a prince of the Royal Blood who strove to usurp the throne of John the Good during his captivity in London;—that it was a Duke of Burgundy who recalled the English to France;—that the Guises wished to rob Henry III. and Henry IV. of the crown in order to place it on their own brows. We also know that it was Ann Maria Louise d'Orléans, best known as Mademoiselle de Montpensier, who had the boldness to order the guns to be fired from the Bastille upon the troops of Louis XIV. All these revolutions were bred and fermented at Paris by unauthorized assemblies, or by meetings of the riotous riff-raff of the capital of France, as in all countries, reckless mobs, recalling to Englishmen the evil days of 1848 in the north of England, so ably and quickly squashed by Sir Robert Peel;—mobs bent on the gratification of selfish or vindictive passions, and ever instigated by desperate leaders and secret societies prompt to turn to profit the confusion of popular excitement, and ready at a moment's notice to tear down all existing institutions for the purpose of re-casting them in moulds of their own devising; whose action is, like that of French Republicans, mistaken for the movement of the nation, and deliberately daring to take into their hands the destinies of a country, wholly unpractised as they are in the science of government and committed to doctrines subversive of society.

"Paris," writes an old historian, "contains big heaps of 'vermine' and 'fripouille,' a large number of discontented, ambitious