The daily tax of the Government is nine thousand francs. The press has been called the Third Estate of France. It is not! Nor is it the second—nor is it the first! It combines all three. Nay, the power of all three united equals not its tithe; and its position—its rank!—royalty itself bows to the press! Ask the history of the past ten years. Point to the man of power or position in the court or State, who owes it not to the press! Where is the statesman who is not, or has not been, a journalist, or the savant, the philosopher, the philanthropist, the poet, the orator, the advocate, the diplomat, even the successful soldier? The sword and the pen are emblems of the power of France—its achievements and its continuance; Sir Bulwer Lytton says,
"The pen is mightier than the sword!"
But I have left you, dear reader, perambulating the dim corridor—so dim that your eyes can hardly decipher, although it is now high noon, the various signs upon the series of doors in the wall on your left, designating the various rooms of the editorial corps, for to the editorial department is devoted the second floor of this extensive edifice. The last door in this prolonged series bears the name of the chief journalist. You ring a bell, are bid to enter, and the apartment is before you. Immense windows, rising from the floor to the ceiling, and opening upon a balcony, which overhangs the Rue Lepelletier, afford abundance of light for your eye to detect everything in the room by day, and an immense chandelier with gas-burners and opaque shades, pouring forth its flood of mellow radiance, would facilitate the same investigation yet more at night. Beneath the chandelier is spread the immense oval slab of the table. At it sits a man writing. Well, let him write on, at least for the present. Beside him, pile upon pile, pile upon pile, rise papers, wave after wave, flood upon flood, nothing but papers; on the floor beneath his feet, on the table and under the table, before him, behind him, and all around him, naught but papers, papers, rising, rising, as if in wrathful might and stormy indignation, while the very walls are lined with papers in all languages, from all climes and governments, and of every age and dimension, deposited in huge folio volumes and arranged in huge closets, along one whole side of the room. From the four continents, yea, and from the islands of the sea likewise, has this vast army come. In those tall closets extending from floor to ceiling might be found the full files for years of every leading paper in every part of Christendom, affording a treasury of reference, universal, unfailing, exhaustless, of knowledge of every conceivable description, rapidly found by means of exact and copious tables of contents.
Upon the other side of the apartment extend ranges of shelves, from floor to ceiling, filled with ponderous tomes in black substantial binding, seeming to belong to that class of standard works chiefly valuable for reference as authorities, and bearing ample testimony in their wear and tear, and their soiled appearance, to having been faithfully fingered. No thin, delicate and perfumed duodecimo is there, resplendent in gold and Russia, with costly engravings on steel, and letter-press in gilt or hot-pressed post. No, the books, the table, the journalist and the whole chamber bear the dark, stern, toil-soiled aspect of labor, the severe air of practical utility. The only ornaments, if such they can be styled, are busts—the busts of the silver-tongued Vergniaud and a few of his political brothers—the victim Girondins of '92 being conspicuous. Here, too, in a prominent niche is the noble front of Armand Carrel, the brave, the knightly, the chivalric, the true Republican, the true statesman, the true journalist, the true man—Armand Carrel, who, with Adolphe Thiers, his associate, sat first in this apartment as its chief—Armand Carrel, who fell years ago before the pistol of Émile de Girardin, a brother journalist, the founder of the cheap press, the hero of scores of combats before and since, yet almost unscathed by all.
Such are some of the ornaments of the chief editor's sanctum. At the further extremity of the apartment, the wall is covered with maps and diagrams, as well as charts of the prominent cities and points in Europe; and a large table beneath is heaped with books of travel, geographical views, and historical scenes arranged with no regard to order, and seeming to lie precisely as thrown down after having been used.
In a word, the whole room bears unmistakable evidence of stern, practical thought. In it and about it display is everywhere scrupulously eschewed. Practical utility is the only question of interest as touching the instruments of an editor, as of those of a carpenter; and the workshop of the journalist bears no inconsiderable similarity to that of the artisan in more respects than one. To each a tool is valuable, be that tool a book or a chisel, only for its usefulness, and the facility and rapidity with which it will aid the possessor to accomplish his ends, and not for its beauty of form, or costliness of material or construction.
In one respect only was there variance from this settled custom to be perceived, and that was in that delicate mechanism embodying the triumphs of modern science, which facilitates transmission of thought, and which, by skillful adaptation, made this one chamber a focus to which ideas and feeling in every other apartment of that vast establishment converged, and which enabled one man, without rising from his chair, to issue his orders to every department, from press-room to composing-room, from foundation stone to the turrets of that tall pile, everything being governed by the will and impulse of a single mind. Indeed, to such an extent is labor-saving carried in the Parisian printing office that the compositor may never have seen the journalist whose leaders he has spent half his life in setting up, for copy, proof and revise glide up or down as if by the agency only of magic, and the real actors rarely meet.