Great is the excitement at the two termini of the Western Railway, the Gare St Lazaro and the Gare Montparnasse, when the special Parliamentary and Ministerial trains are preparing to start for Versailles. The Prefect of Police, a person age of mysterious and awful knowledge, mysteriously takes moral possession of the platform at the Gare St Lazaro. Police officials in black and silver, obviously anxious not to get their swords between their Jeps, hurry about with preoccupied faces. The Premier, half-a-dozen Ministers, and a score or so of foreign diplomatists, are escorted with much cere-many tothe Government train; the Prefects gives a final and comprehensive look round, and off all these great personages go to Versailles, passing an armed sentry every hundred yards or so. The new President might decide to come back by train, and therefore the line must be guarded, in case some frantic enemy should pull up a rail. One never knows what may happen
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.