“FRENCH REPUBLIC.

  “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

“The undersigned Representatives of the People who still remain at liberty, having met together in an Extraordinary Permanent Session, considering the arrest of the majority of their colleagues, considering the urgency of the moment;

“Seeing that the crime of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in violently abolishing the operations of the Public Powers has reinstated the Nation in the direct exercise of its sovereignty, and that all which fetters that sovereignty at the present time should he annulled;

  “Seeing that all the prosecutions commenced, all the sentences
  pronounced, by what right soever, on account of political crimes or
  offences are quashed by the imprescriptible right of the People;

  “DECREE: 

  “ARTICLE I. All prosecutions which have begun, and all sentences which
  have been pronounced, for political crimes or offences are annulled as
  regards all their civil or criminal effects.

  “ARTICLE II.  Consequently, all directors of jails or of houses of
  detention are enjoined immediately to set at liberty all persons
  detained in prison for the reasons above indicated.

  “ARTICLE III.  All magistrates’ officers and officers of the judiciary
  police are similarly enjoined, under penalty of treason, to annul all
  the prosecutions which have been begun for the same causes.

  “ARTICLE IV.  The police functionaries and agents are charged with the
  execution of the present decree.

  “Given at Paris, in Permanent Session, on the 4th December, 1851.”

Jules Favre, as he passed me the decree for my signature, said to me, smiling, “Let us set your sons and your friends at liberty.”  “Yes,” said I, “four combatants the more on the barricades.”  The Representative Duputz, a few hours later, received from our hands a duplicate of the decree, with the charge to take it himself to the Conciergerie as soon as the surprise which we premeditated upon the Prefecture of Police and the Hotel de Ville should have succeeded.  Unhappily this surprise failed.

Landrin came in.  His duties in Paris in 1848 had enabled him to know the whole body of the political and municipal police.  He warned us that he had seen suspicious figures roving about the neighborhood.  We were in the Rue Richelieu, almost opposite the Theatre Francais, one of the points where passers-by are most numerous, and in consequence one of the points most carefully watched.  The goings and comings of the Representatives who were communicating with the Committee, and who came in and out unceasingly, would be inevitably noticed, and would bring about a visit from the Police.  The porters and the neighbors already manifested an evil-boding surprise.  We ran, so Landrin declared and assured us, the greatest danger.  “You will be taken and shot,” said he to us.