There was no lack of impudence in the perpetration of these outrages.  The police agents made merry.  Some of these droll fellows jested.  At Mazas the under-jailors jeered at Thiers, Nadaud reprimanded them severely.  The Sieur Hubaut (the younger) awoke General Bedeau.  “General, you are a prisoner.”—­“My person is inviolable.”—­“Unless you are caught red-handed, in the very act.”—­“Well,” said Bedeau, “I am caught in the act, the heinous act of being asleep.”  They took him by the collar and dragged him to a fiacre.

On meeting together at Mazas, Nadaud grasped the hand of Greppo, and Lagrange grasped the hand of Lamoriciere.  This made the police gentry laugh.  A colonel, named Thirion, wearing a commander’s cross round his neck, helped to put the Generals and the Representatives into jail.  “Look me in the face,” said Charras to him.  Thirion moved away.

Thus, without counting other arrests which took place later on, there were imprisoned during the night of the 2d of December, sixteen Representatives and seventy-eight citizens.  The two agents of the crime furnished a report of it to Louis Bonaparte.  Morny wrote “Boxed up;” Maupas wrote “Quadded.”  The one in drawing-room slang, the other in the slang of the galleys.  Subtle gradations of language.

CHAPTER V.

THE DARKNESS OF THE CRIME

Versigny had just left me.

While I dressed hastily there came in a man in whom I had every confidence.  He was a poor cabinet-maker out of work, named Girard, to whom I had given shelter in a room of my house, a carver of wood, and not illiterate.  He came in from the street; he was trembling.

“Well,” I asked, “what do the people say?”

Girard answered me,—­

“People are dazed.  The blow has been struck in such a manner that it is not realized.  Workmen read the placards, say nothing, and go to their work.  Only one in a hundred speaks.  It is to say, ‘Good!’ This is how it appears to them.  The law of the 31st May is abrogated—­’Well done!’ Universal suffrage is re-established—­’Also well done!’ The reactionary majority has been driven away—­’Admirable!’ Thiers is arrested—­’Capital!’ Changarnier is seized—­’Bravo!’ Round each placard there are claqueurs.  Ratapoil explains his coup d’etat to Jacques Bonhomme, Jacques Bonhomme takes it all in.  Briefly, it is my impression that the people give their consent.”

“Let it be so,” said I.

“But,” asked Girard of me, “what will you do, Monsieur Victor Hugo?”

I took my scarf of office from a cupboard, and showed it to him.

He understood.

We shook hands.

As he went out Carini entered.

Colonel Carini is an intrepid man.  He had commanded the cavalry under Mieroslawsky in the Sicilian insurrection.  He has, in a few moving and enthusiastic pages, told the story of that noble revolt.  Carini is one of those Italians who love France as we Frenchmen love Italy.  Every warm-hearted man in this century has two fatherlands—­the Rome of yesterday and the Paris of to-day.