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FRENCH AFFAIRS.
the Rue des Prouvaires just as the conspirators were arrested, and an agent of police had been shot dead. It had been intended to burn down the Pavilion de Flore and attack the Pavilion Marsan. The King, it is said, is sadly disturbed; women pity him, while men shake their heads in discontent. The French dislike all killing by night. In the stormy days of the Revolution the most terrible deeds were perfectly public and executed by day. As for the horrors of the night of Saint Bartholomew, they were planned and executed by Roman Catholic priests.[1]
How far the concierge of the Louvre was involved in the conspiracy of February 2nd, I have not yet precisely ascertained. Some say that he
- ↑ This is doubtless due to the same cause which makes a French mob disperse when it begins to rain, as our author has observed. I have seen many émeutes with bloodshed in America, and had some experience of them in France, and have observed that in the former country the populace fight on in grim determination, unheeding rain, storm, or darkness, to the very last, till killed or utterly overpowered, and that the fighting always becomes much more desperate after dark. Very often, as I have myself witnessed, rival parties, after pop-shooting all the afternoon at one another, did not close in for a decisive strife till towards midnight, or later. I believe that this is due to the inflexible dogged perseverance of the American in anything which he undertakes, allied to an insatiate curiosity to know without delay what the end will be. The last sentence, or the reference to Saint Bartholomew, is omitted in the French version.—Translator.
