On the Quai d’Orsay, the shouting was redoubled.  There was a great crowd there.  On either side of the quay a file of soldiers of the Line, elbow to elbow, kept back the spectators.  In the middle of the space left vacant, the members of the Assembly slowly advanced between a double file of soldiers, the one stationary, which threatened the people, the other on the march, which threatened tire Representatives.

Serious reflections arise in the presence of all the details of the great crime which this book is designed to relate.  Every honest man who sets himself face to face with the coup d’etat of Louis Bonaparte hears nothing but a tumult of indignant thoughts in his conscience.  Whoever reads our work to the end will assuredly not credit us with the intention of extenuating this monstrous deed.  Nevertheless, as the deep logic of actions ought always to be italicized by the historian, it is necessary here to call to mind and to repeat, even to satiety, that apart from the members of the Left, of whom a very small number were present, and whom we have mentioned by name, the three hundred Representatives who thus defiled before the eyes of the crowd, constituted the old Royalists and reactionary majority of the Assembly.  If it were possible to forget, that—­whatever were their errors, whatever were their faults, and, we venture to add, whatever were their illusions—­these persons thus treated were the Representatives of the leading civilized nation, were sovereign Legislators, senators of the people, inviolable Deputies, and sacred by the great law of Democracy, and that in the same manner as each man bears in himself something of the mind of God, so each of these nominees of universal suffrage bore something of the soul of France; if it were possible to forget this for a moment, it assuredly would be a spectacle perhaps more laughable than sad, and certainly more philosophical than lamentable to see, on this December morning, after so many laws of repression, after so many exceptional measures, after so many votes of censure and of the state of siege, after so many refusals of amnesty, after so many affronts to equity, to justice, to the human conscience, to the public good faith, to right, after so many favors to the police, after so many smiles bestowed on absolution, the entire Party of Order arrested in a body and taken to prison by the sergents de ville!

One day, or rather, one night, the moment having come to save society, the coup d’etat abruptly seizes the Demagogues, and finds that it holds by the collar, Whom? the Royalists.

They arrived at the barracks, formerly the barracks of the Royal Guard, and on the pediment of which is a carved escutcheon, whereon are still visible the traces of the three fleurs de lis effaced in 1830.  They halted.  The door was opened.  “Why!” said M. de Broglie, “here we are.”

At that moment a great placard posted on the barrack wall by the side of the door bore in big letters—­