they think you want to burn their houses down!  It is vain for me to tell them that I speak for futurity, for posterity, for self-interest properly understood; for enterprise where nothing can be lost; that man has preyed upon man long enough; that woman is a slave; that the great providential thought should be made to triumph; that a way must be found to arrive at a rational co-ordination of the social fabric, —­in short, the whole reverberation of my sentences.  Well, what do you think? when I open upon them with such ideas these provincials lock their cupboards as if I wanted to steal their spoons and beg me to go away!  Are not they fools? geese?  The ‘Globe’ is smashed.  I said to the proprietors, ’You are too advanced, you go ahead too fast:  you ought to get a few results; the provinces like results.’  However, I have made a hundred ‘Globes,’ and I must say, considering the thick-headedness of these clodhoppers, it is a miracle.  But to do it I had to make them such a lot of promises that I am sure I don’t know how the globites, globists, globules, or whatever they call themselves, will ever get out of them.  But they always tell me they can make the world a great deal better than it is, so I go ahead and prophesy to the value of ten francs for each subscription.  There was one farmer who thought the paper was agricultural because of its name.  I Globed him.  Bah! he gave in at once; he had a projecting forehead; all men with projecting foreheads are ideologists.

“But the ‘Children’; oh! ah! as to the ‘Children’!  I got two thousand between Paris and Blois.  Jolly business! but there is not much to say.  You just show a little vignette to the mother, pretending to hide it from the child:  naturally the child wants to see, and pulls mamma’s gown and cries for its newspaper, because ‘Papa has dot his.’  Mamma can’t let her brat tear the gown; the gown costs thirty francs, the subscription six—­economy; result, subscription.  It is an excellent thing, meets an actual want; it holds a place between dolls and sugar-plums, the two eternal necessities of childhood.

“I have had a quarrel here at the table d’hote about the newspapers and my opinions.  I was unsuspiciously eating my dinner next to a man with a gray hat who was reading the ‘Debats.’  I said to myself, ’Now for my rostrum eloquence.  He is tied to the dynasty; I’ll cook him; this triumph will be capital practice for my ministerial talents.’  So I went to work and praised his ‘Debats.’  Hein! if I didn’t lead him along!  Thread by thread, I began to net my man.  I launched my four-horse phrases, and the F-sharp arguments, and all the rest of the cursed stuff.  Everybody listened; and I saw a man who had July as plain as day on his mustache, just ready to nibble at a ‘Movement.’  Well, I don’t know how it was, but I unluckily let fall the word ‘blockhead.’  Thunder! you should have seen my gray hat, my dynastic hat (shocking bad hat, anyhow), who got the bit in his