“You have not been condemned for that offence.  Think carefully.”

“I can think of nothing.”

“What!  You have not been to the cafe?”

“Yes, I have breakfasted there.”

“Have you not chatted there?”

“Yes, perhaps.”

“Have you not laughed?”

“Perhaps I have laughed.”

“At whom?  At what?”

“At what is going on.  It is true I was wrong to laugh.”

“At the same time you talked?”

“Yes.”

“Of whom?”

“Of the President.”

“What did you say?”

“Indeed, what may be said with justice, that he had broken his oath.”

“And then?”

“That he had not the right to arrest the Representatives.”

“You said that?”

“Yes.  And I added that he had not the right to kill people on the boulevard....”

Here the condemned man interrupted himself and exclaimed,—­

“And thereupon they send me to Cayenne!”

The judge looks fixedly at the prisoner, and answers,—­“Well, then?”

Another form of justice:—­

Three miscellaneous personages, three removable functionaries, a Prefect, a soldier, a public prosecutor, whose only conscience is the sound of Louis Bonaparte’s bell, seated themselves at a table and judged.  Whom?  You, me, us, everybody.  For what crimes?  They invented crimes.  In the name of what laws?  They invented laws.  What penalties did they inflict?  They invented penalties.  Did they know the accused?  No.  Did they listen to him?  No.  What advocates did they listen to?  None.  What witnesses did they question?  None.  What deliberation did they enter upon?  None.  What public did they call in?  None.  Thus, no public, no deliberation, no counsellors, no witnesses, judges who are not magistrates, a jury where none are sworn in, a tribunal which is not a tribunal, imaginary offences, invented penalties, the accused absent, the law absent; from all these things which resembled a dream there came forth a reality:  the condemnation of the innocent.

Exile, banishment, transportation, ruin, home-sickness, death, and despair for 40,000 families.

That is what History calls the Mixed Commissions.

Ordinarily the great crimes of State strike the great heads, and content themselves with this destruction; they roll like blocks of stone, all in one piece, and break the great resistances; illustrious victims suffice for them.  But the Second of December had its refinements of cruelty; it required in addition petty victims.  Its appetite for extermination extended to the poor and to the obscure, its anger and animosity penetrated as far as the lowest class; it created fissures in the social subsoil in order to diffuse the proscription there; the local triumvirates, nicknamed “mixed mixtures,” served it for that.  Not one head escaped, however humble and puny.  They found means to impoverish the indigent,