Louis Bonaparte has created a special genus.

It was in this manner that Louis Bonaparte made his entry into the
Unexpected.  This revealed him.

Certain brains are abysses.  Manifestly for a long time past Bonaparte had harbored the design of assassinating in order to reign.  Premeditation haunts criminals, and it is in this manner that treason begins.  The crime is a long time present in them, but shapeless and shadowy, they are scarcely conscious of it; souls only blacken gradually.  Such abominable deeds are not invented in a moment; they do not attain perfection at once and at a single bound; they increase and ripen, shapeless and indecisive, and the centre of the ideas in which they exist keeps them living, ready for the appointed day, and vaguely terrible.  This design, the massacre for a throne, we feel sure, existed for a long time in Louis Bonaparte’s mind.  It was classed among the possible events of this soul.  It darted hither and thither like a larva in an aquarium, mingled with shadows, with doubts, with desires, with expedients, with dreams of one knows not what Caesarian socialism, like a Hydra dimly visible in a transparency of chaos.  Hardly was he aware that he was fostering this hideous idea.  When he needed it, he found it, armed and ready to serve him.  His unfathomable brain had darkly nourished it.  Abysses are the nurseries of monsters.

Up to this formidable day of the 4th December, Louis Bonaparte did not perhaps quite know himself.  Those who studied this curious Imperial animal did not believe him capable of such pure and simple ferocity.  They saw in him an indescribable mongrel, applying the talents of a swindler to the dreams of an Empire, who, even when crowned, would be a thief, who would say of a parricide, What roguery!  Incapable of gaining a footing on any height, even of infamy, always remaining half-way uphill, a little above petty rascals, a little below great malefactors.  They believed him clever at effecting all that is done in gambling-hells and in robbers’ caves, but with this transposition, that he would cheat in the caves, and that he would assassinate in the gambling-hells.

The massacre of the Boulevards suddenly unveiled this spirit.  They saw it such as it really was:  the ridiculous nicknames “Big-beak,” “Badinguet,” vanished; they saw the bandit, they saw the true contraffatto hidden under the false Bonaparte.

There was a shudder!  It was this then which this man held in reserve!

Apologies have been attempted, they could but fail.  It is easy to praise Bonaparte, for people have praised Dupin; but it is an exceedingly complicated operation to cleanse him.  What is to be done with the 4th of December?  How will that difficulty be surmounted?  It is far more troublesome to justify than to glorify; the sponge works with greater difficulty than the censer; the panegyrists of the coup d’etat have lost their labor.  Madame Sand herself, although a woman of lofty intellect, has failed miserably in her attempt to rehabilitate Bonaparte, for the simple reason that whatever one may do, the death-roll reappears through this whitewashing.