"The Greater Journey"

[fiefoe]

I didn't expect the book to go into so much detail about all that unrest. The siege was particularly interminable.

• On February 24, (1848), shaken by all that had happened and refusing to order further bloodshed, Louis-Philippe abdicated... Thus ended the 18-year reign of the last king of the French.
• A young Karl Marx.. wrote that the February revolution was the "beautiful revolution," the one in June, the "ugly revolution."
• Hugo would remove himself further to the English Isle of Guernsey, where he would live in exile for fifteen years.
• "Is there not something drearily monotonous in these interminable perspectives?" (during Haussmann's construction binge)
• Brookes kept striking (Sumner), left and right - "thirty first-rate stripes," he later boasted - until the supposedly unbreakable cane shattered. "I wore my cane out completely, but saved the head which is gold."
• "a perfect steeple chase, jumping over ditches and hedges, genders and cases.."
• Civil War had come to France's doorstep... on June 19, 1864, the day the Confederate raider Alabama and the steamer USS Kearsarge fought to the finish off Cherbourg, within view of several thousand spectators.
• Before the start of the siege (by the Germans), Washburne had not only the responsibility.. for the safe, efficient departure of thousand sof Americans,  but of some 30,000 Germans who had been ordered to leave the country.
• Eventually some 65 balloons took flight from Paris carrying more than 2 million pieces of mail. To send dispatches into the city, carrier pigeons were used.
• A rat cost only a little less than a sparrow.. It was generally agreed that the flavor of a brewery rat surpassed that of the sewer rat, due to its diet.
• The Commune issued a decree... to burn the Louvre, another to demolish Notre-Dame, the ultimate symbol of superstition.
• It seems a broken water pipe "miraculously" save the (Venus) statue. Once the smoking ruins were removed, the oak crate was found intact and brought back to the Louvre to be opened.

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