I entered.  The door on opening rang a bell.  At the sound, the door of the glazed partition which separated the shop from the parlor opened, and Auguste appeared.

He knew me at once, and came up to me.

“Ah, Sir,” said he, “it is you!”

“Do you know what is going on?” I asked him.

“Yes, sir.”

This “Yes, sir,” uttered with calmness, and even with a certain embarrassment, told me all.  Where I expected an indignant outcry I found this peaceable answer.  It seemed to me that I was speaking to the Faubourg St. Antoine itself.  I understood that all was at an end in this district, and that we had nothing to expect from it.  The people, this wonderful people, had resigned themselves.  Nevertheless, I made an effort.

“Louis Bonaparte betrays the Republic,” said I, without noticing that I raised my voice.

He touched my arm, and pointing with his finger to the shadows which were pictured on the glazed partition of the parlor, “Take care, sir; do not talk so loudly.”

“What!” I exclaimed, “you have come to this—­you dare not speak, you dare not utter the name of ‘Bonaparte’ aloud; you barely mumble a few words in a whisper here, in this street, in the Faubourg St. Antoine, where, from all the doors, from all the windows, from all the pavements, from all the very stones, ought to be heard the cry, ‘To arms.’”

Auguste demonstrated to me what I already saw too clearly, and what Girard had shadowed forth in the morning—­the moral situation of the Faubourg—­that the people were “dazed”—­that it seemed to all of them that universal suffrage was restored; that the downfall of the law of the 31st of May was a good thing.

Here I interrupted him.

“But this law of the 31st of May, it was Louis Bonaparte who instigated it, it was Rouher who made it, it was Baroche who proposed it, and the Bonapartists who voted it.  You are dazzled by a thief who has taken your purse, and who restores it to you!”

“Not I,” said Auguste, “but the others.”

And he continued, “To tell the whole truth, people did not care much for the Constitution, they liked the Republic, but the Republic was maintained too much by force for their taste.  In all this they could only see one thing clearly, the cannons ready to slaughter them—­they remembered June, 1848—­there were some poor people who had suffered greatly—­Cavaignac had done much evil—­women clung to the men’s blouses to prevent them from going to the barricades—­nevertheless, with all this, when seeing men like ourselves at their head, they would perhaps fight, but this hindered them, they did not know for what.”  He concluded by saying, “The upper part of the Faubourg is doing nothing, the lower end will do better.  Round about here they will fight.  The Rue de la Roquette is good, the Rue de Charonne is good; but on the side of Pere la Chaise they ask, ‘What good will that do us?’ They only recognize the forty sous of their day’s work.  They will not bestir themselves; do not reckon upon the masons.”  He added, with a smile, “Here we do not say ‘cold as a stone,’ but ‘cold as a mason’”—­and he resumed, “As for me, if I am alive, it is to you that I owe my life.  Dispose of me.  I will lay down my life, and will do what you wish.”