The Club de la Delivrance is by far the most reputable public assembly in Paris.
Those who take part in its proceedings are intensely respectable, and as intensely dull and prosy.

The suppression of gas has been a heavy blow to the clubs.

The Parisians like gas as much as lazzaroni like sunshine.
The grandest bursts of patriotic eloquence find no response from an audience who listen to them beneath half-a-dozen petroleum lamps.

It is somewhat singular, but it is not the less certain, that the effect of a speech depends very much upon the amount of light in the room in which it is delivered.

I remember once I went down to assist a friend of mine in an electioneering campaign in a small borough.