There was Lavalette, completing Morny and Walewski.

There was Bacciochi.

And yet others.

It was at the inspiration of these intimate associates that during his Presidency Louis Bonaparte, a species of Dutch Machiavelli, went hither and thither, to the Chamber and elsewhere, to Tours, to Ham, to Dijon, snuffling, with a sleepy air, speeches full of treason.

The Elysee, wretched as it was, holds a place in the age.  The Elysee, has engendered catastrophes and ridicule.

One cannot pass it over in silence.

The Elysee was the disquieting and dark corner of Paris.  In this bad spot, the denizens were little and formidable.  They formed a family circle—­of dwarfs.  They had their maxim:  to enjoy themselves.  They lived on public death.  There they inhaled shame, and they throve on that which kills others.  It was there that was reared up with art, purpose, industry, and goodwill, the decadence of France.  There worked the bought, fed, and obliging public men;—­read prostituted.  Even literature was compounded there as we have shown; Vieillard was a classic of 1830, Morny created Choufleury, Louis Bonaparte was a candidate for the Academy.  Strange place.  Rambouillet’s hotel mingled itself with the house of Bancal.  The Elysee has been the laboratory, the counting-house, the confessional, the alcove, the den of the reign.  The Elysee assumed to govern everything, even the morals—­above all the morals.  It spread the paint on the bosom of women at the same time as the color on the faces of the men.  It set the fashion for toilette and for music.  It invented the crinoline and the operetta.  At the Elysee a certain ugliness was considered as elegance; that which makes the countenance noble was there scoffed at, as was that which makes the soul great; the phrase, “human face divine” was ridiculed at the Elysee, and it was there that for twenty years every baseness was brought into fashion—­effrontery included.

History, whatever may be its pride, is condemned to know that the Elysee existed.  The grotesque side does not prevent the tragic side.  There is at the Elysee a room which has seen the second abdication, the abdication after Waterloo.  It is at the Elysee that Napoleon the First ended and that Napoleon the Third began.  It is at the Elysee that Dupin appeared to the two Napoleons; in 1815 to depose the Great, in 1851 to worship the Little.  At this last epoch this place was perfectly villainous.  There no longer remained one virtue there.  At the Court of Tiberius there was still Thraseas, but round Louis Bonaparte there was nobody.  If one sought Conscience, one found Baroche; if one sought Religion, one found Montalembert.

[14] Better known afterwards as Persigny.

CHAPTER V.

A WAVERING ALLY

During this terribly historical morning of the 4th of December, a day the master was closely observed by his satellites, Louis Bonaparte had shut himself up, but in doing so he betrayed himself.  A man who shuts himself up meditates, and for such men to meditate is to premeditate.  What could be the premeditation of Louis Bonaparte?  What was working in his mind.  Questions which all asked themselves, two persons excepted,—­Morny, the man of thought; Saint-Arnaud, the man of action.