An interesting and instructive little work has been published at Paris on the Workingmen's Associations of that city and country. It is by M. André Cochut, one of the editors of Le National. It gives the history of each of the more important of these establishments, with their mode of organization, number of members, and pecuniary and social results. The title is Les Associations Ouvrières; Histoire et Théorie des Centatives de Reorganisation Industrielle depuis la Révolution de 1848.
A complete edition of the works of George Sand is now publishing at Paris, in parts, with illustrations by Tony Johannot. It is to be elegant, yet cheap, the whole only costing about $5. There will be some six hundred illustrations. The first part contains La Mare au Diable and André, with a new preface to the former, in which the author contradicts the notion that it was intended by her as the beginning of a new order of literature, or was attempted as a new style of writing. Other authors are to follow in the same manner.
The new volume of Thier's History of the Consulate and the Empire is regarded as the most able and most interesting of the series. There is to be one other volume.
Alexander Dumas has written the following letter to the Presse:
"Sir,—I understand that a publisher who at second hand is the owner of a book of mine called "The History of Louis Philippe," intends to issue the work under the title of "Mysteries of a Royal Family." I have written the history of Louis Philippe, just as I have written the histories of Louis XIV., and Louis XV., and Louis XVI., the history of the revolution, and the history of the empire. I have sold this series of historical works to a single publisher, M. Dufour. I never had the intention to provoke the scandal indicated by the title with which I am threatened in substitution for the one that I had given to the work. In the life of Louis Philippe and the royal family there is nothing mysterious. A fatal obstinacy in a course leading to an abyss: there's for the king. For the queen there is goodness, self-sacrifice, charity, religion, virtue. For the deceased royal prince and his living brothers, there is courage, loyalty, gallantry, intelligence, patriotism. You see in all this there is nothing mysterious. If he persists in giving to my book a title which I regard as infamous, the courts of justice shall decide between me and the publisher. May God keep me from invoking aught but historical truth with regard to a man who touched my hand when a king, and my heart, when an exile.
"Alex. Dumas."