to ruin those dying of hunger, to spoil the disinherited; the coup d’etat achieved this wonderful feat of adding misfortune to misery.  Bonaparte, it seems, took the trouble to hate a mere peasant; the vine-dresser was torn from his vine, the laborer from his furrow, the mason from his scaffold, the weaver from his loom.  Men accepted this mission of causing the immense public calamity to fall, morsel by morsel, upon the humblest walks of life.  Detestable task!  To crumble a catastrophe upon the little and on the weak.

CHAPTER XIV.

A RELIGIOUS INCIDENT

A little religion can be mingled with this justice.  Here is an example.

Frederick Morin, like Arnauld de l’Ariege, was a Catholic Republican.  He thought that the souls of the victims of the 4th of December, suddenly cast by the volleys of the coup d’etat into the infinite and the unknown, might need some assistance, and he undertook the laborious task of having a mass said for the repose of these souls.  But the priests wished to keep the masses for their friends.  The group of Catholic Republicans which Frederick Morin headed applied successively to all the priests of Paris; but met with a refusal.  They applied to the Archbishop:  again a refusal.  As many masses for the assassin as they liked, but far the assassinated not one.  To pray for dead men of this sort would be a scandal.  The refusal was determined.  How should it be overcome?  To do without a mass would have appeared easy to others, but not to these staunch believers.  The worthy Catholic Democrats with great difficulty at length unearthed in a tiny suburban parish a poor old vicar, who consented to mumble in a whisper this mass in the ear of the Almighty, while begging Him to say nothing about it.

CHAPTER XV.

HOW THEY CAME OUT OF HAM

On the night of the 7th and 8th of January, Charras was sleeping.  The noise of his bolts being drawn awoke him.

“So then!” said he, “they are going to put us in close confinement.”  And he went to sleep again.

An hour afterwards the door was opened.  The commandant of the fort entered in full uniform, accompanied by a police agent carrying a torch.

It was about four o’clock in the morning.

“Colonel,” said the Commandant, “dress yourself at once.”

“What for?”

“You are about to leave.”

“Some more rascality, I suppose!”

The Commandant was silent.  Charras dressed himself.

As he finished dressing, a short young man, dressed in black, came in.  This young man spoke to Charras.

“Colonel, you are about to leave the fortress, you are about to quit France.  I am instructed to have you conducted to the frontier.”

Charras exclaimed,—­

“If I am to quit France I will not leave the fortress.  This is yet another outrage.  They have no more the right to exile me than they had the right to imprison me.  I have on my side the Law, Right, my old services, my commission.  I protest.  Who are you, sir?”