Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays

I went again to the apartments of Louis Blanc on July 14, with a young American friend, to get tickets for the Rousseau centenary, which was also to be, after the convenient French habit of combination, a celebration of the capture of the Bastille. Rousseau died July 2, 1778, and the Bastille was taken on July 14, 1789, so that neither date was strictly centennial, but nobody ever minds that in Paris; and if it had been proposed that our Declaration of Independence or the Landing of the Pilgrims should also be included in the festival, there would have been no trouble in any mind on account of the dates. Committee men were busy in Louis Blanc's little parlor, and this as noisily and eagerly as if the Bastille were again to be taken: they talked and gesticulated as only Latin races can; in fact, the smallest committee meeting in France is as full of excitement as a monster convention. It is a wonder that these people do not wear themselves out in youth; and yet old Frenchmen have usually such an unabated fire in their eyes, set off by gray hair and often black eyebrows, that they make Anglo-Saxons of the same age look heavy and dull in comparison. French emotion does not exhaust itself, but accumulates strength indefinitely,