"MONSIEUR LE COMMISSAIRE,—The appearance of the cholera-germ in the capital, the source of active anxiety and of real sorrow for all good citizens, has given the perpetual enemies of order a fresh opportunity for spreading infamous calumnies against the Government throughout the population; people have dared to say that the cholera is nothing short of poisoning effected by the agents of those in authority in order to decrease the population and to turn aside the general attention from political questions.

"I am informed that, to give credit to these atrocious conjectures, certain wretches have conceived the project of going through the public-houses and butchers' shops with bottles and packets of poison, either to throw into the fountains or wine casks or on to the meat, or simply to seem to do so and then get arrested in the very act by accomplices, who, after having made out that they were attached to the police, will countenance their escape, and, finally, set everything at work to demonstrate the reality of the odious accusation directed against authority.

"I need only point out such designs to you, monsieur, to make you feel the necessity of redoubling your vigilance over the establishment of dealers in liquids and butchers' shops, and to urge you to warn the inhabitants against attempts which they have a personal and powerful interest in preventing. If such audacious attempts are carried out, I need hardly tell you how important it will be to seize the culprits and to place them in the hands of justice. It is a task in which you will be seconded by all friends of order and by all respectable people.—Receive, etc.

"GISQUET"

An hour after the appearance of such a circular, the Prefect of Police ought to have been prosecuted. But nothing was done. M. Gisquet answered a blunder by a libel. It was no longer the agents of the Government who poisoned the fountains and wine casks to reduce the population and turn attention away from political affairs, it was the Republicans who threw bottles of poison over the butchers' stalls to depopulate the Government of Louis-Philippe! One could understand the first accusation, which sprang out of ignorance; but the second! which came from authority and from such a quarter! a quarter which ought to be the best informed on such affairs as these! The people only asked not to have to believe in the presence of the plague: that invisible enemy, which struck from the heart of the clouds, irritated the people by its invisibility. They refused to believe that one could die of an atmospheric poison, from so pure a sky and so radiant a sun. A material, visible, palpable cause would do its business much more effectually—at all events, revenge could be taken on a tangible cause. Placards containing nearly the same accusations were pasted up. The same day crowds collected round these placards and then they took themselves off to the barriers. Poor unfortunate wretches were knocked down by sticks, assassinated by knife-thrusts, torn by the nails of women and the teeth of dogs. A man would be pointed at with a finger—pursued, attacked and killed! I saw one of these terrible executions from a distance. The crowd moved towards the barrier: one could count the heads by the thousand, each one a wave of that angry ocean; a great number of butcher-boys with their aprons spotted with blood were mixed up in that frightful sea, each apron among all those waves like a crest of foam. Paris threatened to become worse than a great charnel-house: it threatened to become a vast slaughter-house. The prefect was obliged to retract and to recognise that an assassin, a murderer, a poisoner who escaped all capture, had broken loose, and was hiding himself in Paris. That assassin, murderer and poisoner was the cholera!

Oh! who ever saw Paris at that time would forget it, with its implacable blue sky, its mocking sun, its deserted walks, its solitary boulevards, its streets strewn with hearses and haunted by phantoms? Places of public entertainment looked like immense tombs. Harel put the following paragraph in the newspapers during the performances of Dix ans de la vie d'une femme:—

"It has been noticed with surprise that theatres are the only public places where, whatever the number of spectators, no case of cholera had yet appeared. We present this INCONTESTABLE fact for scientific investigation."

Poor Harel! He still had his wits about him, when nobody else had any left or even dreamt of such a thing! It was the Terror of 1793 on a grand scale. In 1793, the worst days counted their thirty or thirty-five victims. Now, the newspapers admitted to between seven and eight hundred deaths per day! It was a strange thing! But other diseases seemed to have disappeared; they were stayed from sheer stupefaction; death had no longer any but the one way of striking. One left a friend at night, shook his hand, saying, "Au revoir!" and, th next day, a voice would come from one knew not where, out of chaos, would whisper in one's ear—

"You knew such and such a person?"

"Yes ... Well?"

"He is dead!"

One had said au revoir; it was adieu one ought to have said instead.

Soon, there was a shortness of coffins: in that terrible steeplechase between death and the coffin-makers, the latter were outdistanced. They wrapped the bodies in tapestries; they rumbled along ten, fifteen, twenty, to the church at once. Relatives followed the common carts or not, as the case might be. Each knew the number of his own dead and mourned them. A mass was said for all collectively; then they wended their way to the cemetery, and tipped the contents of the tapestry into the common grave, and covered them all over with a shroud of lime.