Louis Napoleon is acting as his own commercial traveller in
the South of France, and is inahing a show tour to collect orders for -the kmpire ; and while he is away from Paris, his friends are car- rying on some vagaries, which have in them too much the appear- ance of purpose altogether to escape notice, wearisome as the de- vices of the strolling' company of actors "in power" at the Elysee are becoming. A petition has been put in circulation among the working classes, purporting to come from "fathers of families, and provi- dent workmen"; suggesting that the petitioners cannot get on in any industrial, paternal, or matrimonial capacity, without the help of the supreme ruler, and therefore petitioning that Louis Napo- leon may be permanently elevated to that post. The petition is a sort of blank acceptance by Louis Napoleon, promising advance- ment in trade and domestic felicity to the petitioners; and many of the working classes will, of course, be inclined to draw a bill couched in terms so flattering to themselves. The other device is not on the face of it so intelligible. It would seem that a "talk" about the invasion of England has been ostentatiously got up at the Elysee : a report of the idea gets into the Nation of Brussels; and a reflex of the talk appears in a composition • otherwise unaccountable, in the Constitutionnel of Paris. Proba- bly the bruit is nothing more than one of the theatrical " proper- ties " with which Louis Napoleon is dressing out his pageant as Emperor-elect; but the malevolent spirit to which it points is a chronic disease in a certain class of Frenchmen; and the Con.stitu- tionnel deserves some English gratitude for reminding us that the spirit has net died. out.
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