IV. The Palais-Royal.
But the agitators are already in permanent session. The Palais-
Royal is an open-air club where, all day and even far into the
night, one excites the other and urges on the crowd to blows. In
this enclosure, protected by the privileges of the House of Orleans,
the police dare not enter. Speech is free, and the public who avail
themselves of this freedom seem purposely chosen to abuse it. --
The public and the place are adapted to each other.[18] The Palais-
Royal, the center of prostitution, of play, of idleness, and of
pamphlets, attracts the whole of that uprooted population which
floats about in a great city, and which, without occupation or home,
lives only for curiosity or for pleasure -- the frequenters of the
coffee-houses, the runners for gambling halls, adventurers, and
social outcasts, the runaway children or forlorn hopefuls of
literature, arts, and the bar, attorneys' clerks, students of the
institutions of higher learning, the curious, loungers, strangers,
and the occupants of furnished lodgings, these amounting, it is
said, to forty thousand in Paris.
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