" "Quite true," rejoined the
other, "but what with rampart-duty, demonstrating at the Hotel-de-Ville,
short rations, and the cold weather, I feel quite ten years older than I
formerly did." When horseflesh became more or less our daily provender,
many Parisian _bourgeois_ found their health failing. "What is the matter,
my dearest?" Madame du Bois du Pont inquired of her husband, when he had
collapsed one evening after dinner. "Oh! it is nothing, _mon amie_" he
replied; "I dare say I shall soon feel well again, but I used to think
myself a better horseman!"
Directly our supply of gas began to fail, the wags insinuated that Henri
Rochefort was jubilant, and if you inquired the reason thereof, you were
told that owing to the scarcity of gas everybody would be obliged to buy
hundreds of "_Lanternes_." We had, of course, plenty of sensations in
those days, but if you wished to cap every one of them you merely had to
walk into a cafe and ask the waiter for--a railway time-table.
Once before I referred to the caricatures of the period, notably to those
libelling the Emperor Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie, the latter
being currently personified as Messalina--or even as something worse, and
this, of course, without the faintest shadow of justification.
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