It is the rescue of the traveller by the highwayman.

France was passing by, Bonaparte cried, “Stand and deliver!”

The hypocrisy which has preceded the Crime, equals in deformity the impudence which has followed it.  The nation was trustful and calm.  There was a sudden and cynical shock.  History has recorded nothing equal to the Second of December.  Here there was no glory, nothing but meanness.  No deceptive picture.  He could have declared himself honest; He declares himself infamous; nothing more simple.  This day, almost unintelligible in its success, has proved that Politics possess their obscene side.  Louis Bonaparte has shown himself unmasked.

Yesterday President of the Republic, to-day a scavenger.  He has sworn, he still swears:  but the tone has changed.  The oath has become an imprecation.  Yesterday he called himself a maiden, to-day he becomes a brazen woman, and laughs at his dupes.  Picture to yourself Joan of Arc confessing herself to be Messalina.  Such is the Second of December.

Women are mixed up in this treason.  It is an outrage which savors both of the boudoir and of the galleys.  There wafts across the fetidness of blood an undefined scent of patchouli.  The accomplices of this act of brigandage are most agreeable men—­Romieu, Morny.  Getting into debt leads one to commit crimes.

Europe was astounded.  It was a thunder bolt from a thief.  It must be acknowledged that thunder can fall into bad hands, Palmerston, that traitor, approved of it.  Old Metternich, a dreamer in his villa at Rennweg, shook his head.  As to Soult, the man of Austerlitz after Napoleon, he did what he ought to do, on the very day of the Crime he died, Alas! and Austerlitz also.

THE SECOND DAY—­THE STRUGGLE.

CHAPTER I.

THEY COME TO ARREST ME

In order to reach the Rue Caumartin from the Rue Popincourt, all Paris has to be crossed.  We found a great apparent calm everywhere.  It was one o’clock in the morning when we reached M. de la R——­’s house.  The fiacre stopped near a grated door, which M. de la R——­ opened with a latch-key; on the right, under the archway, a staircase ascended to the first floor of a solitary detached building which M. de la R——­ inhabited, and into which he led me.

We entered a little drawing-room very richly furnished, lighted with a night-lamp, and separated from the bedroom by a tapestry curtain two-thirds drown.  M. de la R——­ went into the bedroom, and a few minutes afterwards came back again, accompanied by a charming woman, pale and fair, in a dressing-gown, her hair down, handsome, fresh, bewildered, gentle nevertheless, and looking at me with that alarm which in a young face confers an additional grace.  Madame de la R——­ had just been awakened by her husband.  She remained a moment on the threshold of her chamber, smiling, half asleep, greatly astonished, somewhat frightened, looking by turns at her husband and at me, never having dreamed perhaps what civil war really meant, and seeing it enter abruptly into her rooms in the middle of the night under this disquieting form of an unknown person who asks for a refuge.