Explore "The Parisians, Book VI" by Edward Bulwer-lytton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
And still the weeks glided on: autumn succeeded to summer, the winter to autumn; the season of Paris was at its height. The wondrous capital seemed to repay its Imperial embellisher by the splendour and the joy of its _fetes_. But the smiles on the face of Paris were hypocritical and hollow. The Empire itself had passed out of fashion. Grave men and impartial observers felt anxious. Napoleon had renounced _les ideas Napoleoniennes_. He was passing into the category of constitutional sovereigns, and reigning, not by his old undivided prestige, but by the grace of party. The press was free to circulate complaints as to the past and demands as to the future, beneath which the present reeled, ominous of earthquake. People asked themselves if it were possible that the Empire could co-exist with forms of government not imperial, yet not genuinely constitutional, with a majority daily yielding to a minority. The basis of universal suffrage was sapped.
About this time the articles in the "Sens Commun" signed Pierre Firmin were creating not only considerable sensation, but marked effect on opinion; and the sale of the journal was immense.