The place of meeting of the National Assembly is in the former theater of the palace, and if one is so fortunate as to have a friend among the deputies, there is no difficulty in securing admission to any session. Ordinarily, guests are shown to boxes, from which they can look down upon the seven hundred representative men of France. The President’s seat is at one end of the hall, with before him a tribune, or platform, from which the deputies speak. On the right of the speaker are the Royalists, including Legitimists, Orleanists, and Imperialists, and on the left the Republicans. Besides these two grand divisions, there are the minor divisions of the Right and Left Center, the former wishing a constitutional monarchy, and the latter a conservative republic. One should visit the Assembly more than once to bring away anything beyond a confused sense of much animated gesticulation, violent discussion, often rising into a frenzy of speech and movement only equalled by the excitement of the Bourse. Calm talk grows to an apparent tempest of speech, for which there is no control, until it subsides of itself. Those familiar with emotional French manner will tell us that it all means nothing serious; that, notwithstanding this turmoil, all important questions are calmly discussed in party councils before they are submitted to public debate, and that the excitement is only the natural outlet of irrepressible human nature as it exists in sunny France. And it matters little with what petty bluster or serious throes she does it, if, out of her agitations, the nation comes, as she seems to be slowly doing, into larger light and truer liberty, into the grand freedom of self-control. Once there, revolutions will cease to be chronic, and regeneration, begun in the governmental center, may permeate the spiritual and intellectual, and ultimately reach even the corruption of the social life. Any influence that tends toward this, however convulsive in its action, must be welcomed by the thinking world. In her transformed palaces and half deserted churches one can but think on these things, forgetting that our business is for the present to observe and not to think. There is small time now for processes of thought, and none for opinions or conclusions. Three-quarters of the globe is before us, and even bewildering, bewitching France must be left behind.