THE LATEST INCIDENT IN PARIS.
THE workmen of Paris have hissed some girls of the demi- monde, and the police are displaying all the alertness of fear. The incident does not seem at first sight one of great public im- portance, nor has it apparently the smallest political bearing. Its authorship can be traced to no secret society, nor does the most acute of mouchards suspect an Orleanist intrigue. And yet the police are as much disturbed as if a conspiracy had been discovered, or a Red had objected to packed ballot-boxes, or an editor had claimed to be tried by a jury, or the Duc d'Aumale had asked once more, "What hast thou done with France ? " They know their countrymen well, and understand only too clearly what this hissing portends. French sentiment, the one antiseptic of French society, has at last been aroused, and the signs of returning health frighten phy- sicians whose status depends on disease. The ouvriers think that vice has been a little too rampant, and the thought audibly expressed in hissing bodes no good to the regime under which vice has called for the demonstration.
The evil required a check, but Englishmen, accustomed to believe that morality exists only in England, seem surprised that it should be administered of all places in Paris. They mistake, however, the tone of the society which it seems so easy to understand. French. men, indifferent to principle, are still amenable to ideas, and the workmen have on this subject a decided idea of their own. They tolerate vice as vice with a readiness possible only to men who hold all things more tolerable than hypocrisy. They are not themselves given to marriage, and they, like French jurymen, pardon any offence of which, as they believe, a sentiment is the cause. But the form of vice now raging involves no sentiment, and is, in its publicity and its success, as abhorrent to French opinion as to that of the sounder classes at home. The women wilna have been hissed are not mistresses or even unfaithful wives, but women, unredeemed by a trace of feeling, who sell themselves to the highest bidder, and are, except in manner, the most brazen of courtezans. When- ever an era of corruption sets in, and fortunes are quickly made, and the press is compelled to keep silence, and legitimate excitement is a matter for the correctional police, these creatures rise to the top. Paris, Marseilles, and Bordeaux are swarming with women, the hangers-on of the nouveaux riches, whose one passion, except avarice, is to obtain by an ostentation of luxury the consideration denied to their characters. Everywhere their dresses are the richest, their horses the fastest, their retinues the most insolent in the throng. Stand in the Rotten Row of Marseilles, and if you see an equipage to which all eyes turn, and a woman who looks as haughty as aristocrats are supposed to be, be sure you see one of this class, distinguished from her sisters on the pave only by success, and the gold success has secured. The people whom we deem so immoral consider the sight simply an insult to them. It is not the splendour which annoys them, though, doubtless, by making the evil prominent it helps to produce dislike. Democracy is envious in France as in America, but in a very different way. It does not dislike mere splendour, which helps to colour existence, but rather enjoys its effect. A wealthy goose in New York, who put a gilt lamp over his door, was told by his neighbours to take it down, as it looked too aristocratic. A Parisian would have accepted the lamp as a gift to the street population. But he will not tolerate insult, and for these women to parade in the public places, not as items in the throng, but as Queens of Society, is an insult to him which he feels as keenly as a gentleman would were they introduced to his house. Louis may live as he likes with Adolphe's entire acquiescence, but if he bring his connexions too near to Adolphe's household Adolphe will strike as hard as if he believed in virtue.
There is, too, another and a nobler impulse than this. A French- man, however degraded, never loses one feeling—which, if not virtue, tends to produce it—his respect for the honour of France. Dissolute, or even criminal, he still acknowledges an ideal to which all men but himself ought in decency to conform. The correspondent of the Globe tells this week a story which, even if it be traced to the salons, still exactly expresses French sentiment on this, point. Two men were last week convicted of murder, and were called up for judgment. The sentence was death, and as they left the bar, they exclaimed, " Take us to Douai. We appeal !" They were murderers, but that was no reason why they should not feel that the Court of Douai had in the Mires case cynically refused to be just. The ideal even of mur- derers was an incorruptible magistracy, and so the ideal of the disso- lute is a society, equal and tolerant, with no rigour and no espionage, but nevertheless substantially virtuous and austere. The Parisians see that under the Empire the ideal is being abandoned, that society does not even pretend to reverence what they respect, that its contempt for opinion grows cynical, that the lees are paraded and talked about as if they were the test of the wine, and they hiss in angry disgust. It is not a pleasant sign for a regime which cannot affect austerity, and still less can try to be pure ; and quiet observers will not wonder that the police, who remember in 1831 and 1848 a similar symptom, who know that nothing in France can ever survive contempt, and who are aware that the " honour of France ". is as dear to the soldiery as to the workmen, are stirring themselves to abate the nuisance the workmen have hissed. Phryne is sent to the provinces, and Aspasia has a hint to go home ; but the evil is irre- mediable, and the vapours will only thicken till the fresh air is again let in. It is when the agora is closed that the Athenian hastens to Lais.
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