As these carriages drove up a personage, bald, but still young, was seen to appear at the grated door of the Place de Bourgogne.  This personage had all the air of a man about town, who had just come from the opera, and, in fact, he had come from thence, after having passed through a den.  He came from the Elysee.  It was De Morny.  For an instant he watched the soldiers piling their arms, and then went on to the Presidency door.  There he exchanged a few words with M. de Persigny.  A quarter of an hour afterwards, accompanied by 250 Chasseurs de Vincennes, he took possession of the ministry of the Interior, startled M. de Thorigny in his bed, and handed him brusquely a letter of thanks from Monsieur Bonaparte.  Some days previously honest M. De Thorigny, whose ingenuous remarks we have already cited, said to a group of men near whom M. de Morny was passing, “How these men of the Mountain calumniate the President!  The man who would break his oath, who would achieve a coup d’etat must necessarily be a worthless wretch.”  Awakened rudely in the middle of the night, and relieved of his post as Minister like the sentinels of the Assembly, the worthy man, astounded, and rubbing his eyes, muttered, “Eh! then the President is a ——.”

“Yes,” said Morny, with a burst of laughter.

He who writes these lines knew Morny.  Morny and Walewsky held in the quasi-reigning family the positions, one of Royal bastard, the other of Imperial bastard.  Who was Morny?  We will say, “A noted wit, an intriguer, but in no way austere, a friend of Romieu, and a supporter of Guizot possessing the manners of the world, and the habits of the roulette table, self-satisfied, clever, combining a certain liberality of ideas with a readiness to accept useful crimes, finding means to wear a gracious smile with bad teeth, leading a life of pleasure, dissipated but reserved, ugly, good-tempered, fierce, well-dressed, intrepid, willingly leaving a brother prisoner under bolts and bars, and ready to risk his head for a brother Emperor, having the same mother as Louis Bonaparte, and like Louis Bonaparte, having some father or other, being able to call himself Beauharnais, being able to call himself Flahaut, and yet calling himself Morny, pursuing literature as far as light comedy, and politics, as far as tragedy, a deadly free liver, possessing all the frivolity consistent with assassination, capable of being sketched by Marivaux and treated of by Tacitus, without conscience, irreproachably elegant, infamous, and amiable, at need a perfect duke.  Such was this malefactor.”

It was not yet six o’clock in the morning.  Troops began to mass themselves on the Place de la Concorde, where Leroy-Saint-Arnaud on horseback held a review.

The Commissaries of Police, Bertoglio and Primorin ranged two companies in order under the vault of the great staircase of the Questure, but did not ascend that way.  They were accompanied by agents of police, who knew the most secret recesses of the Palais Bourbon, and who conducted them through various passages.