still to Biarritz, and the midsummer tide of fashion followed after her.
Across the downs, on the bluff, stands the _Villa Eugénie_, the handsel
of Biarritz's prosperity; and here about us is the town that grew up to
make her court.

Fair France lost as well as gained when the burning walls of the
Tuileries crashed in. In these days of the plain French Republic,--of
its sober, unornamental, business government,--the contrast is vivid
with the glitter and "go" of Louis Napoleon's régime. And the nation
feels it, and involuntarily grieves over it. The twenty years have far
from sufficed to smother that certain inborn Gallic joy in
monarchy,--autocratic rule, a brilliant court, leadership in fashion,
and all the pomp and pageantry which the French love so well.

Little more than a century ago, stable governments seemed at last to be
ruling the world; civilization had come to believe itself finally at
peace; war, it was complacently said, had finished its work; the coming
cycles would prove so far tamed as to have outgrown fightings and
revolutions. Cultured modern history, like Nature, would refuse to
proceed _per saltum_. Yet the hundred years since gone by have brought
wars as fierce, "leaps" of government as tremendous, as any century in
the past. It is this same fair France that has contributed more than her
share of them, and the Fall of the Second Empire was one of the most
dramatic. The world is not, after all, so securely merged from the
darkness of the Dark Ages. Within that short century, in Paris itself,
the very capital of cultured Europe, there has twice uprisen a human
savagery immeasurably exceeding all the tales we are to tell of the
fierce past of the Pyrenees.

It needs an effort to-day to picture the social power of France and