were governed, if not by public principle, at least by private ambition. Even the blood which they shed was often the result, in their estimation, not so much of terror or danger as of overbearing necessity. They deemed it essential to the success of freedom, and regarded the victims who perished under the guillotine as the melancholy sacrifice which was required to be laid on its altar."

The Jacobin Club was the product of the most extraordinary and terrible political derangement that ever existed. As such complete powerlessness of the government, and so complete an annihilation of all conservative influences and elements, are no longer conceivable, it must ever remain an isolated phenomenon without a parallel in the world's history, for nothing but these could have converted the modest union of forty-four deputies from Brittany, which assembled at Versailles in May, 1789, into that revolutionary power, whose terrible sway for years bade defiance to every other power, and filled the world with horror. And yet the essence of Jacobinism consisted only in its destructive energy. It could destroy, it could not create; and from its very origin there rested upon it the curse of self-annihilation, which brought ruin upon all who endeavored, by its aid, to raise themselves to authority and influence.

After the closing of the Jacobin Club, the convent was declared national property. On the 17th of May, 1795, the Convention ordered the construction upon its site of a market, under the name of Marché du Neuf Thermidor; and on June 24 following, the sale of all the buildings of the former convent was decreed. They were soon removed, and the new sheds erected. At a later period, the market was for a long time called the Marché des Jacobins, but it is now known as the Marché St. Honoré. Though few or no traces of the original building remain, it is worth the traveller's while, if he be in Paris, to make a pilgrimage to the spot where the Jacobin Club once met; and, if his curiosity should lead him thither early in the morning, he will be tempted to think that the confused Babel around him is no unfit emblem of the Club, while the strong-voiced marketwomen cannot fail to suggest the dames des halles, and the heroines who so constantly crowded its galleries.

That the spirit of Jacobinism still exists in Europe, and that it finds many adherents, is a truth which every year's history brings home to the world, and especially to the despots of Europe. But it is not so well known that the race of original Jacobins is not yet entirely extinct. Yet so it is. Mr. Zinkeisen narrates an interview that he had in Paris with one of the "furies of the guillotine," a woman filled with the most profound contempt for all that the world has since experienced, and an equally profound admiration for Robespierre. He went one morning with a friend to a low café near the famous abbaye, where they had scarcely seated themselves when an old woman of very peculiar appearance entered and took a seat at a table which by common consent seemed left for her. The stuff and fashion of her clothes were of the last century, and in her hand she had a large bag containing her provisions for the day, which she had doubtless just purchased in the Marché St. Germain. Her face, which was covered by a projecting bonnet, was wrinkled, browned, and hollowchecked, but still expressive, and not without traces of the fire of her earlier passions. She had been one of the most daring, furious heroines of the galleries of the Jacobin Club during "the reign of terror," a fact which was generally known, and which she by no means denied, for she would still have sworn to die at her post for Robespierre. She was reserved, absentminded, and monosyllabic. "Ah, the divine Marat! The incorruptible Robespierre! The infamous Cabarrus, the jade! They assassinated him, these Thermidorists";— this was all that could be got out of her. She seemed to wander in another world. That some of her companions, and indeed some of the Jacobins themselves, may still survive, is by no means impossible; for their opponents, surviving royalists of the same generation, may still occasionally be seen in Paris.

ART. VII.- · Mémoires d'un Bourgeois de Paris. Par le DR. J. VERON. Comprenant la Fin de l'Empire, la Restauration, la Monarchie de Juillet, et la République jusqu'au Rétablissement de l'Empire. Paris. 1853-55.

Dr.

In the first place, this title, like most titles, is inexact. Véron does not give you any notion of the times which either precede or follow his own. We mean by "his own," those in which he was an actor, the eighteen years during which the much or little that was in him developed itself to the utmost extent whereof it was capable, and caused him to be, according to his own phrase, "somebody." This very expression is applied by him to his position in the year 1829, on the eve of the Revolution, which was to bring him, with so many others of his moral class and stamp, forward into a kind of relative importance. "One must, in the world, as quickly as possible take his measures to be somewhere and with some one; it is a way to become somebody." This theory, however, never helped our learned Doctor beyond the government of the Académie Royale de Musique, and even his influence as proprietor of the Constitutionnel is powerless to make a "personage" of him, when compared with the éclat by which he is surrounded as autocrat of the Grand Opera. As Joseph de Maistre was perfectly exact in affirming that "no nation ever had any but the government it deserved," so it is true that (with the exception of a very few isolated cases) men do not arrive at the position they desire, but at that for which they are fit. Observe, we are not speaking of those who, as Shakespeare says, are "born great," or, as the French express it, naissent tout arrivés; neither do we say that all men fill the places for which they are fit. We have to do with those who "achieve greatness," and start from a point far beneath that to which they tend; being, therefore, when they reach the latter, essentially in the condition of men who have, as we term it, arrived at a destination, not of those who have been there all their lives. We repeat it, such men do not "arrive " at what they hope for, or dream of, or pass their whole existence in attempting to take by storm

or by cunning, but simply at that for which they are fit. The whole carcer of the once famous subject of this article will supply us with the proof of what we have said. From the hour when he first entered upon his studies as a medical practitioner to the present day, when he has attained, however far below his aim it may be, the destiny for which he was formed, Dr. Véron has never ceased sighing for the exercise of what his countrymen would call "serious" public functions, and has under no power, however friendly, by the aid of no intrigue, however unscrupulous, been able to achieve that end. The best and most perfect directeur d'opera, France or the world ever saw, the type, so to speak, of all directors to come, that was M. Véron, and that development of his activity he reached under the reign of the citizen king. Connected with his attainment to this position, with his discharge of its duties, with his ardent wish to exchange them for others, is a series of circumstances which undoubtedly makes of this individual's career one of the completest commentaries extant upon the political and philosophical history of Louis Philippe's reign. Before going any further, to exemplify this, we will give a brief sketch of Dr. Véron's "birth, parentage, and education,” in order that our readers may be familiar with the leading actor of the curious comedy entitled Mémoires d'un Bourgeois de Paris.

Born on the 5th of April, 1798, M. Véron is, at the present day, aged nearly fifty-eight years. Now a man's age has always this importance, that it shows you at what particular period of his life certain events occurred, and produced certain impressions upon him, modifying his character and influencing his carcer. The fall of the Empire found him a mere boy, and its glories had shone only during his infancy and childhood; consequently, whatever he could know of that period of his country's history came from hearsay. At the Concours of 1821, he was admitted to hospital practice, and in 1823 received the diploma of Docteur en Médecine. He was then twenty-five years of age, having attained the ripe maturity of what was still youth at the time when the government of Louis XVIII. was affording to France the full measure of that intellectual development and material pros

perity which his short reign alone procured for her, and to which, in the same degree, she was a stranger before and has been ever since.

Dr. Véron's first hospital practice took him to the establishment of the Enfans Trouvés under Baron, the physician to the "children of France," as the Duc de Bordeaux and Mademoiselle were then termed. He does not perceive, what every reader sees at a glance, that, notwithstanding all his political pretensions, he naturally, and as it were instinctively, judges everything from the point of view of his real capacity, and of the one position to which he was inevitably destined, that of Director of the Grand Opera. Thus, when alluding to his studies at the Foundling Hospital, "Every morning," observes he, "I regularly submitted at least a dozen and a half of new-born babies to the action of a vapor bath, which, from humanity and conscience, I also undertook myself to support with them. The poor little wretches and I used to come out of these ovens red as boiled lobsters, and I confess that the voices of Nourrit and Duprez, and the points d'orgue of Madame Damoreau herself, have never been able to banish from my ears the cries and yells of these miserable abortions of the human form." And later, our Æsculapius says: "I certainly, in a twelvemonth, used to dissect more than a hundred and fifty new-born babies; I have studied the nutritive capacities of more than two hundred nurses, and presided over their departure with their nurslings for their various homes. There was a vast difference, no doubt, between these morning occupations of mine in the amphitheatres and hospitals and my evening employments in the coulisses of the opera!"

A difference, no doubt, yet to appreciate it thoroughly it requires to have seen the individual himself. This advantage many of our countrymen and countrywomen have had, and we dare say, Boston or New York, Philadelphia or Washington, could produce more than one eyewitness of the full-blown splendors of a man who, in our century, not inaptly represented the celebrated traitans and fermiers généraux of the two centuries preceding. Who is there, who, having visited Paris between the years 1835 and 1847, has forgotten the famous