“Become yourselves again, reflect; acknowledge your faults; rise up!  Think of your Generals arrested, taken by the collar by galley sergeants and thrown handcuffed into robbers’ cells!  The malefactor, who is at the Elysee, thinks that the Army of France is a band of mercenaries; that if they are paid and intoxicated they will obey.  He sets you an infamous task, he causes you to strangle, in this nineteenth century, and in Paris itself, Liberty, Progress, and Civilization.  He makes you—­you, the children of France—­destroy all that France has so gloriously and laboriously built up during the three centuries of light and in sixty years of Revolution!  Soldiers! you are the ‘Grand Army!’ respect the ‘Grand Nation!’

“We, citizens; we, Representatives of the People and of yourselves; we, your friends, your brothers; we, who are Law and Right; we, who rise up before you, holding out our arms to you, and whom you strike blindly with your swords—­do you know what drives us to despair?  It is not to see our blood which flows; it is to see your honor which vanishes.

“Soldiers! one step more in the outrage, one day more with Louis Bonaparte, and you are lost before universal conscience.  The men who command you are outlaws.  They are not generals—­they are criminals.  The garb of the galley slave awaits them; see it already on their shoulders.  Soldiers! there is yet time—­Stop!  Come back to the country!  Come back to the Republic!  If you continue, do you know what History will say of you?  It will say, They have trampled under the feet of their horses and crushed beneath the wheels of their cannon all the laws of their country; they, French soldiers, they have dishonored the anniversary of Austerlitz, and by their fault, by their crime, the name of Napoleon sprinkles as much shame to-day upon France as in other times it has showered glory!

  “French soldiers! cease to render assistance to crime!”

My colleagues of the Committee having left, I could not consult them—­time pressed—­I signed: 

  “For the Representatives of the People remaining at liberty, the
  Representative member of the Committee of Resistance,

  “VICTOR HUGO.”

The man in the blouse took away the Proclamation saying, “You will see it again to-morrow morning.”  He kept his word.  I found it the nest day placarded in the Rue Rambuteau, at the corner of the Rue de l’Homme-Arme and the Chapelle-Saint-Denis.  To those who were not in the secret of the process it seemed to be written by hand in blue ink.

I thought of going home.  When I reached the Rue de la Tour d’Auvergne, opposite my door, it happened curiously and by some chance to be half open.  I pushed it, and entered.  I crossed the courtyard, and went upstairs without meeting any one.

My wife and my daughter were in the drawing-room round the fire with Madame Paul Meurice.  I entered noiselessly; they were conversing in a low tone.  They were talking of Pierre Dupont, the popular song-writer, who had come to me to ask for arms.  Isidore, who had been a soldier, had some pistols by him, and had lent three to Pierre Dupont for the conflict.