The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1871-06-07
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1t was two or three years ago that Carl
baldi, in one of those fervid poems which
make us wonder where the true field of this
rarely gifted genius lies-whether as orator or
soldier or poet-said of Louis Napoleon, that
the time would come when men might be
permitted to pity him; until then it was our
duty to hate him. The world has been wait
ing anxiously for that day, and thus far with
out immediate prospect of fruition. He will
not allow us the luxury of ceasing to regard
him as a noxious and dangerous thing 1t has
seemed, several times in the course of the
last year, as if the day were at hand when
we might lay aside our attitude of hostility
to him, and begin to contemplate that charac-
ter of the elderly citizen, the fond husband
and devoted father, the somewhat stupid and
tiresome, but, on the whole, well-meaning
bourgeois, which, we are convinced, lies
latent somewhere in the possibilities of M.
Bonaparte's life. His worst faults have been
those of the false position into which the
accident of his mothers husbands name has
forced him. Without particle of the Corsi-
can fire and ambition, he has felt that, be-
cause he was christened Napoleon, he must
straddle along in the vast footprints of the
great Italian. Unlike the bird of Andersen's
story, he is an Ugly Duck, whose life has
been rendered wretched by the circumstance
of having been born in an eagles nest. This
worthy of his name led him
into the grotesque follies of Stras-
burg and Boulogne, and tormented his
idle exile in London and New Jersey. After
the blind worship of q name had raised him
from his contemplate obscurity to the chair
of the Presidency, this torturing gad-fy of
Napoleonic tradition made him the tool of the
other audacious and needy gamesters who
were willing to risk their nothing against the
oh Of nd T,ot
the game succeeded was simply the conse-
quence of the time at which it was attempted
France was thoroughly exhausted by its three
long years of revolutionary effort, and an
honest man in the Presidency would have
made the republic as permanent as the empire
became. The fatal error of the French was
not in accepting the coup d'etat but in the
thoughtless leyity with which they gave the
keys of the commonwealth to a servant of
whom they knew nothing, and who proved
thief.
During his long and specifically prosper
ous reign it was natural that the resentment
of the honest world should elevate him into
sort of dignity which never properly be-
longed to him. What careless observers
dazzled by the gliding of the new and showy
throne, called his success was simply the re-
suit of the general industry and genius of
France. There was the same apparent pros
perity under Louis Philippe, and he was as
little the cause of it as Bonaparte was after
him. If there was an added life and move
ment in certain directions, it was because
the English contagion of railroad building had
invaded France, and Morse had taught the
world the use of the telegraph. Paris was torn
down and built up again by that king of
the gnomes, Baron Haussmann, loading the
city with debt and overcrowding its streets
with those clamorous artisans who have since
overturned the throne But the sarcastic
King of Paris used to say that his imperial
master never touched plan without leaving
a blunder on it. He used generally to treat
o the august suggestions of the uneasy meddler
with contempt, salying all wounds of dignity
by assignments of eligible corner-lots to Lou
Lou and his mother But to the unthinking
tourist, and to those foreigners whose minds
are 80 constituted that they can see but one
person in an era, the dreamy and listless pre-
tender of the Tuileries seemed to be doing
everything which the forty millions of
Frenchmen wrought in twenty years.
He sorely strained his own powers of illu-
sion once or twice. The fascos of the Crimea
and of Italy were sufficiently obscured by the
smoke of burnt gunpowder to hide his imbe-
cility from the people at large; but the diplo-
macy which eliminated with Sadowa, and
whose aftermath was seen in the retreat from
Luxembourg, began to open many most unsus-
picious eyes. He seemed to feel last year that
he was growing to be but an Indifferent
Sphinx; there were signs of his people guess
ing his riddle, and so, on the most frivolous
pretext which the history of diplomacy re-
cords, he rushed into the most unequal fight
ever seen in the history of wars. edo
Fef 1t seemed all the way from Weissemburg Il
Chiselhurst that the time set by Garibaldi fol
pity to begin was come. Nothing was ever
seen more forlorn than that comedy OF th'
victory of Saarbruck followed by the rout o
Worth. 1t was enough to move the stonies
heart to hear of him sauntering about amont
the suffers, saying mournfully, SION nj
trompe;" still, when he had no more though
of fighting than his boy had, grooming tn
old Napoleonic phrases about the tete dan
NEE: and at last surrendering when al
d about him begged him to ride with then
through the thin line of the enemy. Their
was a positive sensation of relief to ever
feeling heart when he was safe at Viii
helmshohe, free from the wearing respor
sibilities of policy and war. Those wer
happy days The Kaiser's cook was with him
and the sharp Castilian accent of his spirite
spouse was away. In the words of Mr.. Whit
man, she loafed and invited his SOUL" Some
81 times he reused himself and made littl
speeches disparaging the republic, but tn
gentle exercise rather aided digestion. Ii
no had "a good time at Williams Heights, an
we felt sort of sympathy with him in thos
days. We heard of his expanding waistban
with the Joy of the just over the wicked thl
2 have ceased from troubling.
q But now he has gotten to England, and tt
.p Empress is with him, and his little court su
rounds him, and they have kindled the fan
of ambition again in his peaceful breast, az
l will not let him alone He is full of plots an
plans, vague as the smoke of his cigarett