Were it not for the _cabarets_, would not the Government be overturned
every Tuesday? Happily, by Tuesday, this people is glutted, sleeps off
its pleasure, is penniless, and returns to its labor, to dry bread,
stimulated by a need of material procreation, which has become a habit
to it. None the less, this people has its phenomenal virtues, its
complete men, unknown Napoleons, who are the type of its strength
carried to its highest expression, and sum up its social capacity in
an existence wherein thought and movement combine less to bring joy
into it than to neutralize the action of sorrow.
Chance has made an artisan economical, chance has favored him with
forethought, he has been able to look forward, has met with a wife and
found himself a father, and, after some years of hard privation, he
embarks in some little draper's business, hires a shop. If neither
sickness nor vice blocks his way--if he has prospered--there is the
sketch of this normal life.
And, in the first place, hail to that king of Parisian activity, to
whom time and space give way. Yes, hail to that being, composed of
saltpetre and gas, who makes children for France during his laborious
nights, and in the day multiplies his personality for the service,
glory, and pleasure of his fellow-citizens. This man solves the
problem of sufficing at once to his amiable wife, to his hearth, to
the _Constitutionnel_, to his office, to the National Guard, to the
opera, and to God; but, only in order that the _Constitutionnel_, his
office, the National Guard, the opera, his wife, and God may be
changed into coin.
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