Our Paris Letter.

Thames Star, Volume XIV, Issue 4588, 18 September 1883, Page 2

Our Paris Letter.

(FKOM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT).

Pabis, July 12. The importance that the death, or hopeless recovery, of the Comte de Chambord has taken in the political world here is significant. The disappearance of the Count removes the obstacle for the real fusion this time of all the royalists. With the death of the last heir of the elder branch of the Bourbons, vanishes legitimacy and its absolute doctrines of divine right. The Comte de Paris, the political _heir to the Crown of France, must now either abdicate or act. If he assumes the rqle of pretender he will be banished within twenty-four hours, And this fate will not be spared him even were he to countenance the expedient of resigning b'S heritage to bis son the Dae d'Orleans, aged 13. Failing both these arrange-' tnents, many of the ultra-royahsta will rally to Don Carlos, to whom the Comte Ide Chambord has left all tbat he couldl in tho way of goods and chattels—a windfall for the Don's creditors. The Comte de Chambord never was dangerous for the Hepublie. He was a respectable, powerless debris, of a past that nothing could make re-live, for Franca of the nmefceeath century will

never return to the institutions demolished by 1879. Kven for a liberal Monarchy, incarnated by the Comte de Paris as Louis Philippe 11. and differing in nothing from the present Republic, only having the chief of the State more permanent in office than M. Grery, the duration would be difficult, because the French have c -rapletely repudiated the very idea of kingship. The rising generation have not even a conception :'of; that -■form of governmen 1. * France will certainly modify her hasty policy respecting Tonquin. She has such a number of affairs to settie, that she is compelled to demand time. In the interim the Oppositionist journal*, to draw attention off accumulated blunders, continue to denounce England, whose crime and good sense, reside in unnoticing such pranks. The man of the day is Trouillebert, a poor painter, who lived by imitating the style of Corot, and so well, that his pictures, purchased for 200fr., by attaching Corot's signature, sold for 11.000fr., and were pronounced by Petit, pumas, and all experts as genuine. The city is laughing at the heavy sell practised on the first judges of the day. It is as common to fabricate paintings by Diaz, Dupre*, Meissonnier, &c , as antiquities. It is a curious coincidence that the Comte de, Cbambord bad the same fatal disease as Napoleon I. and Gambetta. When the latter was on his deathrbed, the Monarchal journals were very indecent in their attacks against the great patient and his malady. 'They; saw the finger of God in Gambetta's dissolution. The Republican journals indulge in no similar remarks respecting the Comte de Chambord. They merely view him as a political fossil, iodged at Frodshorf as in a museum. But they render tribute not the less to his patriotic letters during the German invasion. Bonapartism was scotched at Sedan and killed at Zululand. Its hybrid Liberalism and democralicCseaarism are as much an anachronism . as the absolutism of the Comte de Chambord, and as little dangerous for the Republic. And the powers that be know this so well that it is on the Orleanist it fixes its eyes as the only foeman worthy of its steel. Licked into shape, a Liberal and Monarchal party, supported on the Pacific and prosperous souvenirs of Louis Philippe^ could cause some headaches to the third Republic.