La Belle France! Inimitable Paris! what a medley of expectations attends upon visiting these centres of travel. They run the gamut of pleasure from the exhilarating boards of the “light fantastic toe,” to the arenas where learning and skill walk in solemn mental pomp, and genius essays its wings for loftier flights from the heights of knowledge. There the heart vibrates from all the phases of frivolity, through the glows of vanity, love and ambition, to the glamours of suicide.
They proceed to Versailles, and indulge in mocking criticisms upon its costly and useless structures and empirical history.
They surveyed with care, Paris and its environs. They thought of it as a communistic volcano or as the cradle of revolutions.
Immortal.—“Blessed is the person or nation, who has a Faith, however crude! But, in truth, the French have no faith of any stable or guiding kind. Nor do they permit themselves to be either calm enough to study or rational enough to understand the mission of Reason. They do not truly apply it to either religion or government. Their women are practically wiser than their men; in their domain of society the former have instituted a system of mere life. Both have some tangible notions on the art of living on earth. Neither think very coherently on the Beyond. Natural (not mental) Philosophy, in all its branches, is their most successful sphere. Their German rivals surpass them in mental speculations and innocuous transcendentalisms.”
They enter the Tuileries. The Emperor of the French expressed his keen appreciation of the objects of their grand and adventurous tour. With respectful earnestness he asked many questions in regard to it; especially in relation to political developments. In reply to a question by the American in reference to the assumptions of his own dynasty, he asseverated that it was a Napoleonic conception, maxim and design, “that the virtues and rights of the people could and should be asserted under the one-man representative power—that Imperialism and Republicanism could be identicalized in and under governmental action. That no other kind of government either suited or would satisfy the French. And that he ever studied Great Britain and the United States as among the leading examples before him, in devising the measures of his action and the formulas of his policy.”
He, also, assigned this as a reason why he and his uncle had not been favored by the old imperial or royal régimes. His Empress, the lovely Eugenie, was marked in her gracious deference, and uttered some angelic sentiments in support of her husband’s theory.
At Court the ethereal party received the attentions of the savans of the world’s scientific metropolis, and with them visited their meeting. Abstruse topics were discussed. In reply to an inquiry upon electricity, the Immortal intimated “that, although it was not his province to discuss the connection between mind and matter, or to expound what agency magnetism had in relation to it, yet as the brain and body of man were a series of electric batteries, and electricity a fluid that pervaded the earth, it would in time, by an effort of the will, and by an action of the human body under and in certain conditions, become a medium of thought and converse between any two persons at different spots on the earth.”
American.—“Will they hold conversations as if in a tête-à-tête?”
Immortal.—“Yes. Without using language, Americans will thus converse with Chinese.”
They visited in the Invalides the Tomb of Napoléon le Grand. Before it the American was irresistibly affected by the awe, wonder and curiosity, which may be felt for the majesty of mind.