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,[1220] "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.