The officer answered for these soldiers as for himself.  After long conversations with the seditious, to bring them back to reason and the law, Simoneau returned to the maison commune, ordered the red flag to be unfurled, proclaimed martial law, and then advanced upon the rebels, surrounded by the municipal body, and in the centre of the armed force; on reaching the square of the town, the crowd surrounded and cut off the detachment.  The troopers left the Maire exposed—­not one drew his sword in his defence.  In vain did he summon them, in the name of the law, and by the weapons they wore, to render aid to the magistrate against assassins—­in vain did he seize the bridle of one of the horsemen near him, crying, “Help, my friends.”

Struck by blows of pitchforks and guns, at the moment when he appealed to the soldiery, he fell, shot, grasping in his hands the bridle of the cowardly trooper whom he was entreating:  the fellow, in order to disengage himself, struck with the back of his sabre the arm of the Maire already dead, and left his body to the insults of the people.  The miscreants, remaining in possession of the carcase, brutally mangled the palpitating limbs, and deliberated together as to cutting off the head.  The leaders made their followers defile passing over the body of the Maire, and trampling in his blood.  Then they went away beating their drums, and went to get drunk in the suburbs; and the taking away the grain, the apparent motive of the riot, was neglected in the moment of triumph.  There was no pillage—­either the blood made the people forget their hunger, or their hunger was but the pretext for assassination.

III.

At the moment when all was thus crumbling to pieces round the throne, a man, celebrated by the vast part attributed to him in the common ruin, sought to reconcile himself with the king:  this was Louis-Philippe Joseph, Duc d’Orleans, first prince of the blood.  I pause for this man, before whom history has hitherto paused, without being able to discover the real place which should be assigned to him amongst the passing events.  An enigma to himself, he remains an enigma for posterity.  Was the real solution of this enigma ambition or patriotism, weakness or conspiracy?  Let facts reply.

Public opinion has its prejudices.  Struck by the immensity of the work it accomplishes; giddy, as it were, by the rapidity of the movement which urges things on, it cannot believe that a series of natural causes, combined by Providence with the rise of certain ideas in the human mind, and aided by the coincidence of the times, can of itself produce such vast commotions.  It seeks, then, the supernatural—­the wonderful—­fatality.  It takes pleasure in imagining latent causes acting with mystery, and compelling with hidden hand men and events.  It takes, in a word, every revolution for a conspiracy; and if it meets at starting, in the middle, or at