Captain La Roche d’Oisy brought a letter from the Minister of War, which placed himself and his soldiers at the disposition of the manager of the National Printing Office.  The muskets were loaded without a word being spoken.  Sentinels were placed in the workrooms, in the corridors, at the doors, at the windows, in fact, everywhere, two being stationed at the door leading into the street.  The captain asked what instructions he should give to the sentries.  “Nothing more simple,” said the man who had come in the fiacre.  “Whoever attempts to leave or to open a window, shoot him.”

This man, who, in fact, was De Beville, orderly officer to M. Bonaparte, withdrew with the manager into the large cabinet on the first story, a solitary room which looked out on the garden.  There he communicated to the manager what he had brought with him, the decree of the dissolution of the Assembly, the appeal to the Army, the appeal to the People, the decree convoking the electors, and in addition, the proclamation of the Prefect Maupas and his letter to the Commissaries of Police.  The four first documents were entirely in the handwriting of the President, and here and there some erasures might be noticed.

The compositors were in waiting.  Each man was placed between two gendarmes, and was forbidden to utter a single word, and then the documents which had to be printed were distributed throughout the room, being cut up in very small pieces, so that an entire sentence could not be read by one workman.  The manager announced that he would give them an hour to compose the whole.  The different fragments were finally brought to Colonel Beville, who put them together and corrected the proof sheets.  The machining was conducted with the same precautions, each press being between two soldiers.  Notwithstanding all possible diligence the work lasted two hours.  The gendarmes watched over the workmen.  Beville watched over St. Georges.

When the work was finished a suspicious incident occurred, which greatly resembled a treason within a treason.  To a traitor a greater traitor.  This species of crime is subject to such accidents.  Beville and St. Georges, the two trusty confidants in whose hands lay the secret of the coup d’etat, that is to say the head of the President;—­that secret, which ought at no price to be allowed to transpire before the appointed hour, under risk of causing everything to miscarry, took it into their heads to confide it at once to two hundred men, in order “to test the effect,” as the ex-Colonel Beville said later on, rather naively.  They read the mysterious document which had just been printed to the Gendarmes Mobiles, who were drawn up in the courtyard.  These ex-municipal guards applauded.  If they had hooted, it might be asked what the two experimentalists in the coup d’etat would have done.  Perhaps M. Bonaparte would have waked up from his dream at Vincennes.

The coachman was then liberated, the fiacre was horsed, and at four o’clock in the morning the orderly officer and the manager of the National Printing Office, henceforward two criminals, arrived at the Prefecture of Police with the parcels of the decrees.  Then began for them the brand of shame.  Prefect Maupas took them by the hand.