“What do you want me to do?” said he, mingling with his alarmed protests many law maxims and Latin quotations, an instinct of chattering jays, who pour forth all their vocabulary when they are frightened.  “What do you want me to do?  Who am I?  What can I do?  I am nothing.  No one is any longer anything. Ubi nihil, nihil.  Might is there.  Where there is Might the people lose their Rights. Novus nascitur ordo.  Shape your course accordingly.  I am obliged to submit. Dura lex, sed lex.  A law of necessity we admit, but not a law of right.  But what is to be done?  I ask to be let alone.  I can do nothing.  I do what I can.  I am not wanting in good will.  If I had a corporal and four men, I would have them killed.”

“This man only recognizes force,” said the Representatives.  “Very well, let us employ force.”

They used violence towards him, they girded him with a scarf like a cord round his neck, and, as they had said, they dragged him towards the Hall, begging for his “liberty,” moaning, kicking—­I would say wrestling, if the word were not too exalted.

Some minutes after the clearance, this Salle des Pas Perdus, which had just witnessed Representatives pass by in the clutch of gendarmes, saw M. Dupin in the clutch of the Representatives.

They did not get far.  Soldiers barred the great green folding-doors.  Colonel Espinasse hurried thither, the commander of the gendarmerie came up.  The butt-ends of a pair of pistols were seen peeping out of the commander’s pocket.

The colonel was pale, the commander was pale, M. Dupin was livid.  Both sides were afraid.  M. Dupin was afraid of the colonel; the colonel assuredly was not afraid of M. Dupin, but behind this laughable and miserable figure he saw a terrible phantom rise up—­his crime, and he trembled.  In Homer there is a scene where Nemesis appears behind Thersites.

M. Dupin remained for some moments stupefied, bewildered and speechless.

The Representative Gambon exclaimed to him,—­

“Now then, speak, M. Dupin, the Left does not interrupt you.”

Then, with the words of the Representatives at his back, and the bayonets of the soldiers at his breast, the unhappy man spoke.  What his mouth uttered at this moment, what the President of the Sovereign Assembly of France stammered to the gendarmes at this intensely critical moment, no one could gather.

Those who heard the last gasps of this moribund cowardice, hastened to purify their ears.  It appears, however, that he stuttered forth something like this:—­

“You are Might, you have bayonets; I invoke Right and I leave you.  I have the honor to wish you good day.”

He went away.

They let him go.  At the moment of leaving he turned round and let fall a few more words.  We will not gather them up.  History has no rag-picker’s basket.

[3] This grated door was closed on December 2, and was not reopened until the 12th March, when M. Louis Bonaparte came to inspect the works of the Hall of the Corps Legislatif.