Be it as it may, the Legitimist party, taken as a whole, entertained no horror of the coup d’etat.  It feared nothing.  In truth, should the Royalists fear Louis Bonaparte?  Why?

Indifference does not inspire fear.  Louis Bonaparte was indifferent.  He only recognized one thing, his object.  To break through the road in order to reach it, that was quite plain; the rest might be left alone.  There lay the whole of his policy, to crush the Republicans, to disdain the Royalists.

Louis Bonaparte had no passion.  He who writes these lines, talking one day about Louis Bonaparte with the ex-king of Westphalia, remarked, “In him the Dutchman tones down the Corsican.”—­“If there be any Corsican,” answered Jerome.

Louis Bonaparte has never been other than a man who has lain wait for fortune, a spy trying to dupe God.  He had that livid dreaminess of the gambler who cheats.  Cheating admits audacity, but excludes anger.  In his prison at Ham he only read one book, “The Prince.”  He belonged to no family, as he could hesitate between Bonaparte and Verhuell; he had no country, as he could hesitate between France and Holland.

This Napoleon had taken St. Helena in good part.  He admired England.  Resentment!  To what purpose?  For him on earth there only existed his interests.  He pardoned, because he speculated; he forgot everything, because he calculated upon everything.  What did his uncle matter to him?  He did not serve him; he made use of him.  He rested his shabby enterprise upon Austerlitz.  He stuffed the eagle.

Malice is an unproductive outlay.  Louis Bonaparte only possessed as much memory as is useful.  Hudson Lowe did not prevent him from smiling upon Englishmen; the Marquis of Montchenu did not prevent him from smiling upon the Royalists.

He was a man of earnest politics, of good company, wrapped in his own scheming, not impulsive, doing nothing beyond that which he intended, without abruptness, without hard words, discreet, accurate, learned, talking smoothly of a necessary massacre, a slaughterer, because it served his purpose.

All this, we repeat, without passion, and without anger.  Louis Bonaparte was one of those men who had been influenced by the profound iciness of Machiavelli.

It was through being a man of that nature that he succeeded in submerging the name of Napoleon by superadding December upon Brumaire.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE D’ORSAY BARRACKS

It was half-past three.

The arrested Representatives entered into the courtyard of the barracks, a huge parallelogram closed in and commanded by high walls.  These walls are pierced by three tiers of windows, and posses that dismal appearance which distinguishes barracks, schools, and prisons.

This courtyard is entered by an arched portal which extends through all the breadth of the front of the main building.  This archway, under which the guard-house has been made, is close on the side of the quay by large solid folding doors, and on one side of the courtyard by an iron grated gateway.  They closed the door and the grated gateway upon the Representatives.  They “set them at liberty” in the bolted and guarded courtyard.