QU ARTIER LATIN I TIES 49 



delight at the crowning moment when the baby's 

 mattress is sent skinnning forth over their heads by 

 " M. GuignoVs " devastating flipper. Their backs, 

 crowded close, are dark as a hiving swarm round the 

 enclosm-e, and in spite of the defiance of the pro- 

 prietress' eye, she well knows what an air of fashion 

 is imparted by the non-paying spectators, what a 

 magnetic influence upon families promenading afar 

 among the aisles of bare tree-stems. 



The French public, as it is seen in these gardens, 

 cannot indeed be described as hlase or effete in the 

 matter of amusing itself. This may be gay, wicked 

 Paris ; but here, beneath a horse-chestnut tree all 

 alight with tiers of red blossom, three fashionable 

 beings in frock-coats and floating neckties are playing 

 battledore and shuttlecock and rolling a hoop. At a 

 little distance a fourth, with shouts of laughter, 

 dandles an air-balloon, and puffs out his fat, bearded 

 cheeks to blow it upwards ; while his white Pomeranian, 

 clipped to the ridiculous semblance of a lion, regards 

 him from a chair with the expression of an elderly 

 and wearied governess. Beside the statue of a 

 Grecian lady, who has the air of having taken the 

 wrong medicine, a widow in stiff crape lappets is 

 throwing a big painted ball on the ground and catching 

 it in her arms as it bounds ; she has done it so often 

 that she has become unpleasantly warm. 



Well, it has not always been child's play in the 

 Luxembourg Gardens. These hawthorns that make 

 a coolness along the balustrade of the terrace doubtless 

 were in a similar reverie of fragrance and bloom on the 

 bright Sunday in May when the Communists were 

 taken out here from their court-martial in the Palace 

 and shot en masse while the long daylight lasted, men 

 and women, black with powder and the soot of 

 conflagration. The man playing with the air-balloon 



