distinguished. This was the place.

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 barri