p. 310 | Untitled article

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, October 29, 1867

Political Rumors and Wild Excitement in France.

The various rumors, of a political and personal description, which have kept Paris so long in state of doubt and dread, came to a culmination on Wednesday last, and threw the city into such a state of confusion as it has not seen or felt for many a day. Men ran up and down the streets with elongated countenances, each consulting the faces of all others he met, hoping to find either confirmation or denial of the terrible rumors that were flying, like flocks of canards, over Paris. At the Bourse, which was the center where all the terrible stories concentrated, there was great fright. Rentes went down sixty-five centimes, and all other government securities fell in proportion, and a general desire for a stampede seemed to seize upon the sellers. The stories in circulation, and to which thousands of people gave their firm belief, were of the most horrible description. The Emperor had suddenly become raving, stark mad, and was obliged to be straight-jacketed and kept a close prisoner in the Villa Eugenie at Biarritz. He had received an apoplectic stroke, and was speechless and dying. At the same time, General Fleury, after an interview with Bismark, at Berlin, had quitted him in anger. The French fleet was all ready to sail from Toulon for Civita Vecchia, and the Romans were on the point of rising.

The consternation which pervaded Paris during Wednesday, resulting from the circulation of these stories, was only a sample on a very small scale of what will be witnessed when the time comes—as, in the order of nature, it must come sooner or later—when the Emperor’s “golden bow!” shall be broken; and, instead of its being a malevolent rumor for stock jobbing purposes, the truth shall be told in the streets of Paris, that “the Emperor is dead.”

It is surprising that the hopes of thirty-six millions of people should thus hang on the life of one man, but so it is. Nobody has the slightest faith that, in case of his death, the succession of his dynasty would proceed in regular order. Everybody knows that sooner or later there must be a revolution, and that for a time at least all would be turmoil and confusion. It might not come immediately. All the precautions have long since been taken to prevent it and to oppose it if it occur, and blood would run like water in the streets in carrying into effect the latter.

The facilities for this are much greater now than they have ever been before. The little, narrow, crooked streets in the very heart of the city, which the revolutionists of former times could barricade in a few minutes by knocking over an omnibus and tearing up a few paving stones, no longer exist, but have given place to broad and beautiful avenues, which could be swept and kept clear with no difficulty by means of artillery. Soldiers need no longer be shot at in their passage through the streets by citizen revolutionists from their windows. The splendid system of sewerage, which has been perfected under the reign of the present Emperor, is something more than a system of sewerage—one by means of which troops can be rapidly transported from one part of Paris to another, unseen and unexposed.

Now, of course the primary object of these immense subterranean canals and railways, which extend beneath all Paris, is drainage. But it will be readily seen what facilities they afford for the transportation of troops, and it is said that the whole “garde de Paris” is exercised in small squads in descending and mounting, in embarking in the boats and disembarking to the cars. So that in case of their being transported in this manner, they would be somewhat familiarized with it in advance. One of the outlets, one of the principle “stations” for this network of subterranean railway lines extending over Paris, is in the court yard of the Tuileries, into which five thousand men could be thus made to rise out of the ground in half an hour after the orders had been sent for them by telegraph.—Paris Cor. N. Y. Herald.

Watch your life jealously.