days gone by, now the honoured mouthpiece of the army, fighting, with his usual weapons, the battle of the Church and the aristocracy. Devout Catholics will say to-day of the man whose name some years ago they could not bring themselves to mention: C'est un bien brave homme ("Such an honest fellow!") and well-born ladies of unimpeachable morals and manners will spend their halfpennies on the Intransigeant, in which this amiable gentleman exhales his patriotic wrath. A more singular union has never been celebrated even in France, land of incongruous contracts and odd proximities, than that between M. Henri Rochefort and the army of France, the Church, and the aristocracy.
The attitude of the army to-day may be traced to the two parties in the land already mentioned, through its commanders and officers, who naturally belong to either or both. The officers who are not well born—and they are many—would fain conceal the circumstance in a snobbish democracy, and, as a consequence, adopt with exaggerated fervour the prejudices of the class to which they desire to be admitted. For there are no partisans of aristocratic privilege so impassioned and so silly, as the middle class, who ape their ways and espouse their cause through snobbishness. It is upon the weakness of this class that the nobles of France are playing so
