recklessly. Every second officer calls himself a count, or viscount, and is accepted as such with joy in provincial circles and by wealthy parvenus. I should be sorry to deny the respectability of honest religious convictions, but Catholicism at the present hour in France is too much a question of fashion and politics to inspire respect. Men who, to my knowledge, believe in nothing, make a point of ostentatiously attending religious services and simulating attitudes of advanced piety, because they think it "good form," and that it will give them tone in the eyes of their neighbours. They are well aware that they cannot hope to place Philip of Orleans on an unstable throne, being too cognisant of the fact that that singular pretender is held in light esteem even by his followers and would be far from welcome to the large majority of his intelligent compatriots, still less to the working classes, and so they pin their faith to the military dictator.
The popularity of the French army to-day, the outcome, be it said, of a well-worked political campaign, in which credulous French officers have been shamelessly used as mere tools, is hard for us to understand, if it were for nothing else but the heavy mortgage on man's freshest and most ardent years which it implies. How, one asks one's self, can independent citizens accept such a tax when combined resistance to it ought to be so easy? For, after all, in a
