[Footnote 81: PARIS AT DINNER.--An ogress, gentleman! A famished creature, faring sumptuously; her face flushed with wine, her eyes bright, her hands trembling. Madame Lutetia is a strapping woman still, with a queenly air about her, in spite of the red patches on her tunic; somewhat shorn of her ornaments, it is true, as she has had to pawn the greater part of her jewelry, but the orgie once over she will be again what she was before.
For the time being she is wholly absorbed in her gastronomic exertions. She has already devoured a Bergeret with peas, a Lullier with anchovy sauce, an Assy and potatoes, a Cluseret with tomatos, a Rossel with capers, besides a large quantity of small fry, and she is not yet appeased. The _maître-d'hôtel_ Delescluze waits upon her somewhat in trepidation, with a sickly smile on his face. What if, after such a meal of generals and colonels, the ogress were to devour the waiter!--_Fac simile of design from the "Grelot," 17th May, 1871_.]
[Footnote 82: Delescluze's wild life began at Dreux, in 1809. Driven from home on account of his bad conduct, he came to Paris, and obtained employment in an attorney's office, from which he was very soon afterwards, it is said, discharged for robbery. In 1834, he underwent the first of his long list of imprisonments, for the part he took in the April revolution, and in the following year, being compromised in a conspiracy against the safety of the state, he took refuge in Belgium, Where he obtained the editorship of the _Courrier de Charleroi_. In 1840 he returned to Paris, where he founded a journal called the _Révolution Démocratique et Sociale_, which brought him fifteen months' imprisonment and twenty thousand francs fine. After a long period of liberty of nearly eight years, he was condemned to transportation by the High Court of Justice, but the condemnation was given in his absence, for he had slipped over to England, where he remained until 1853. On his returning in that year to France he was immediately imprisoned at Mazas, transferred afterwards to Belle-Isle, and then successively to the hulks of Corte, Ajaccio, Toulon, Brest, and finally to Cayenne. These sojourns lasted until 1868, when the amnesty permitted him to return to France, where he made haste to bring out another new journal, _Le Réveil_, which of course earned him fines and imprisonments with great rapidity, three of each within the twelvemonth.