the side of the Palais Royal, or from the
Boulevards, you might hear the noise of
the shouting of the hosts who were doing
battle within its walls and under the
peristyle. Doing battle! Yes, and battle
of a terrific kind, for we do not believe if
all the beasts of the Zoological Gardens, of
the Jardin des Plantes, of Mr. Wombwell's
menagerie, and all the menageries of Europe
were turned into one arena to fight it out
altogether, they would make a more
discordant noise, or combat with more merciless
violence, than the hosts who day by day
met within that building of classic exterior,
infuriated by the " accursed hunger
for gold," the auri sacra fames of our
ancient school friend. The battle was none
the less deadly because no wreck of combat
lay visibly before the eyes, because the
pavement after the fight was not blood-
stained, and heaped with piles of dead and
wounded. The little strips of paper by
which the fight was carried on were as
deadly weapons in their way as the Chasse-
pot and Henry-Martini rifles, and one of
these might be sufficient to bring the roof-
trees of whole families to the ground, to
plunge them in perdition, and condemn
them to that inexorable ruin and slow
decay which is more painful than death
itself.

Let us recal the way they did business
on the Bourse.

Outside of the building, under the
peristyle, the fight is lively enough, though
not so intense as the struggle within.
These outer skirmishers are the coulissiers,
the courtiers marrons, the unlicensed
agents of speculation, the free lances of the
boursicotier tribe, who in guerilla fashion
form themselves around various centres of
combat, and jostle and hustle together,
crying and shouting aloud in their offers
to buy and sell all sorts of securities, and
pricking down on their little tablets the
rises and falls of values, just as the gamblers
of Homburg and Baden prick off the
sequences and the intermittences at trente
et quarante. Let us pass through the crowd
and between the two gardes de Paris, who
keep watch over the door, and go within.
Plutus! what a din! The vast hall, with its
galleries on either side, is filled with incessant
volleys of shoutings, like continuous
volleys of musketry of the newest invention.
The densest mass of the crowd is
collected around a raised scaffolding
surrounded by a railing, and called the parquet
or the corbeil, where those terrible functionaries
the agents de change, the French
stockbrokers, lead the fray, with fierce
gesticulations and beatings of the air. Briareus,
with his hundred arms, and a little memorandum
book, or a little batch of papers
in each hand, seems to be savagely striking
at invisible foes, or seeking for something
that he may devour. What it all means,
what is doing, or how any one can possibly
make himself heard in such a fury of voices,
is a mystery to the uninitiated. Old soldiers
who stand by the outer rail of the parquet,
some decorated, but in civil uniforms, are
busily engaged in passing backwards and
forwards little strips of paper to Briareus
and his hundred arms at the inner rail,
and as the papers pass backwards and
forwards, Briareus shouts and screams out
his war-cry, and dashes his hundred arms
about wildly as though goaded into a new
fit of frenzy. What, in fact, is going on
is, playing for a fall, or playing for a rise,
in the three per cents, four per cents,
shares of the Banque de France, obligations
of the Ville de Paris, Italian, Spanish,
and Lombard rentes, shares of the Canal
de Suez; and after each successive
engagement the official staff of the employés
of the Bourse shout forth from the parquet
the result of the combat, in voices strong
enough to rise above the whirlwind of
shouting, which dashes from wall to wall,
and surges up against the roof which
covers in this theatre of daily warfare.
Greed! greed! greed! as merciless as
the appetite of the wolf, glares from the
hot and excited mien, and twitches
convulsively the nervous claws of many a
human beast of prey who is there watching,
with adroit manoeuvres, cunning artifices,
with the aid of lying rumours and other
perfidious stratagems, to make prey
of the produce of the worker. These are
the true wasps and hornets of humanity,
who swarm here in a daily conflict for the
patient accumulations of the hive. Here it
is, indeed, that is prepared that daily list
of values, destined to be perused with
palpitating interest by the readers of the evening
and morning papers, which is the bulletin
of the daily campaign of gain and
speculation, and the daily gauge of the
wildest, most merciless, and most permanent
passions of man. Often have we listened to
the cry, " Le Cours de la Bourse, messieurs,
le Cours de la Bourse," the victor shout of
cupidity, the triumphant proclamation of
the outcome of the monetary strife of the
time, and then thought of the ruined household,
of the dispersal of family goods, the