As soon as one of our compatriots joins a secret society his first care is to go to his favorite restaurant and to confide, under a bond of the most absolute secrecy, to his most intimate friend, what he has known for about five minutes, the aim of the conspiracy, names of the actors, the day, hour, and place of the rendezvous, the passwords and countersigns.  A little while after he has thus relieved himself, he is surprised that the police interfere and spoil an enterprise that has been prepared with so much mystery and discretion.  It was in this way that the “beards” dealt in dark deeds of conspiracy at the Cafe de Seville.  At the hour for absinthe and mazagran a certain number of Fiesques and Catilines were grouped around each table.  At one of the tables in the foreground five old “beards,” whitened by political crime, were planning an infernal machine; and in the back of the room ten robust hands had sworn upon the billiard-table to arm themselves for regicide; only, as with all “beards,” there were necessarily some false ones among them, that is to say, spies.  All the plots planned at the Seville had miserably miscarried.

The art of building barricades was also—­you never would suspect it!—­very ardently and conscientiously studied.  This special branch of the science of fortification reckoned more than one Vauban and Gribeauval among its numbers.  “Professor of barricading,” was a title honored at the Cafe de Seville, and one that they would willingly have had engraved upon their visiting-cards.  Observe that the instruction was only theoretical; doubtless out of respect for the policemen, they could not give entirely practical lessons to the future rioters who formed the ground-work of the business.  The master or doctor of civil war could not go out with them, for instance, and practise in the Rue Drouot.  But he had one resource, one way of getting out of it; namely, dominoes.  No! you never would believe what a revolutionary appearance these inoffensive mutton-bones took on under the seditious hands of the habitues of the Cafe de Seville.  These miniature pavements simulated upon the marble table the subjugation of the most complicated of barricades, with all sorts of bastions, redans, and counterscarps.  It was something after the fashion of the small models of war-ships that one sees in marine museums.  Any one, not in the secret, would have supposed that the “beards” simply played dominoes.  Not at all!  They were pursuing a course of technical insurrection.  When they roared at the top of their lungs “Five on all sides!” certain players seemed to order a general discharge, and they had a way of saying, “I can not!” which evidently expressed the despair of a combatant who has burned his last cartridge.  A “beard” in glasses and a stovepipe hat, who had been refused in his youth at the Ecole Polytechnique, was frightful in the rapidity and mathematical precision with which he added up in three minutes his barricade of dominoes.  When this man “blocked the six,” you were transported in imagination to the Rue Transnonain, or to the Cloitre St. Merry.  It was terrible!