No! no! no extenuation whatever is possible.  Unfortunate Bonaparte.  The blood is drawn.  It must be drunk.

The deed of the 4th of December is the most colossal dagger-thrust that a brigand let loose upon civilization has ever effected, we will not say upon a people, but upon the entire human race.  The stroke was most monstrous, and struck Paris to the ground.  Paris on the ground is Conscience, is Reason, is all human liberty on the ground; it is the progress of centuries lying on the pavement; it is the torch of Justice, of Truth, and of Life reversed and extinguished.  This is what Louis Bonaparte effected the day when he effected this.

The success of the wretch was complete.  The 2d of December was lost; the 4th of December saved the 2d of December.  It was something like Erostratus saving Judas.  Paris understood that all had not yet been told as regards deeds of horror, and that beneath the oppressor there was the garbage-picker.  It was the case of a swindler stealing Cesar’s mantle.  This man was little, it is true, but terrifying.  Paris consented to this terror, renounced the right to have the last word, went to bed and simulated death.  Suffocation had its share in the matter.  This crime resembled, too, no previous achievements.  Even after centuries have passed, and though he should be an Aeschylus or a Tacitus, any one raising the cover would smell the stench.  Paris resigned herself, Paris abdicated, Paris surrendered; the novelty of the treason proved its chief strength; Paris almost ceased to be Paris; on the next day the chattering of this terrified Titan’s teeth could be heard in the shadows.

Let us lay a stress upon this, for we must verify the laws of morality.  Louis Bonaparte remained, even after the 4th of December, Napoleon the Little.  This enormity still left him a dwarf.  The size of the crime does not change the stature of the criminal, and the pettiness of the assassin withstands the immensity of the assassination.

Be that as it may, the Pigmy had the better of the Colossus.  This avowal, humiliating as it is, cannot be evaded.

Such are the blushes to which History, that greatly dishonored one, is condemned.

THE FOURTH DAY—­THE VICTORY.

CHAPTER I.

WHAT HAPPENED DURING THE NIGHT—­THE RUE TIQUETONNE

Just as Mathieu de la Drome had said, “You are under King Bomba,” Charles Gambon entered.  He sank down upon a chair and muttered, “It is horrible.”  Bancel followed him.  “We have come from it,” said Bancel.  Gambon had been able to shelter himself in the recess of a doorway.  In front of Barbedienne’s alone he had counted thirty-seven corpses.  What was the meaning of it all?  To what purpose was this monstrous promiscuous murder?  No one could understand it.  The Massacre was a riddle.

We were in the Sphinx’s Grotto.