If canine rabies is a fearful subject to contemplate, there is a sadder and deeper significance in rabies humana; in that awful madness of the human race which is marked by a thirst for blood and a rage for destruction.  The remembrance of such a distemper which has attacked mankind, especially mankind of the Parisian sub-species, came over me very strongly when I first revisited the Place Vendome.  I should have supposed that the last object upon which Parisians would, in their wildest frenzy, have laid violent hands would have been the column with the figure of Napoleon at its summit.  We all know what happened in 1871.  An artist, we should have thought, would be the last person to lead the iconoclasts in such an outrage.  But M. Courbet has attained an immortality like that of Erostratus by the part he took in pulling down the column.  It was restored in 1874.  I do not question that the work of restoration was well done, but my eyes insisted on finding a fault in some of its lines which was probably in their own refracting media.  Fifty years before an artist helped to overthrow the monument to the Emperor, a poet had apostrophized him in the bitterest satire since the days of Juvenal:—­

  “Encor Napoleon! encor sa grande image! 
    Ah! que ce rude et dur guerrier
  Nous a coute de sang et de pleurs et d’outrage
    Pour quelques rameaux de laurier!

* * * * *

  “Eh bien! dans tous ces jours d’abaissement, de peine,
    Pour tous ces outrages sans nom,
  Je n’ai jamais charge qu’un etre de ma haine,... 
    Sois maudit, O Napoleon!”

After looking at the column of the Place Vendome and recalling these lines of Barbier, I was ready for a visit to the tomb of Napoleon.  The poet’s curse had helped me to explain the painter’s frenzy against the bronze record of his achievements and the image at its summit.  But I forgot them both as I stood under the dome of the Invalides, and looked upon the massive receptacle which holds the dust of the imperial exile.  Two things, at least, Napoleon accomplished:  he opened the way for ability of all kinds, and he dealt the death-blow to the divine right of kings and all the abuses which clung to that superstition.  If I brought nothing else away from my visit to his mausoleum, I left it impressed with what a man can be when fully equipped by nature, and placed in circumstances where his forces can have full play.  “How infinite in faculty! ... in apprehension how like a god!” Such were my reflections; very much, I suppose, like those of the average visitor, and too obviously having nothing to require contradiction or comment.