They fill the garden and the
galleries; "one would hardly find here one of what were called the
"Six Bodies,"[19] a bourgeois settled down and occupied with his own
affairs, a man whom business and family cares render serious and
influential. There is no place here for industrious and orderly
bees; it is the rendezvous of political and literary drones. They
flock into it from every quarter of Paris, and the tumultuous,
buzzing swarm covers the ground like an overturned hive. "Ten
thousand people," writes Arthur Young,[20] "have been all this day
in the Palais-Royal;" the press is so great that an apple thrown
from a balcony on the moving floor of heads would not reach the
ground. The condition of these heads may be imagined; they are
emptier of ballast than any in France, the most inflated with
speculative ideas, the most excitable and the most excited. In this
pell-mell of improvised politicians no one knows who is speaking;
nobody is responsible for what he says. Each is there as in the
theater, unknown among the unknown, requiring sensational
impressions and strong emotions, a prey to the contagion of the
passions around him, borne along in the whirl of sounding phrases,
of ready-made news, growing rumors, and other exaggerations by which
fanatics keep outdoing each other.
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