bly taken part in the meeting, and that was all. Mathieu (de la
Drome) brought us the events of the day, the details of the arrests at
their own houses carried out without any obstacle, of the meeting which
had taken place at M. Daru's house and its rough treatment in the Rue
de Bourgogne, of the Representatives expelled from the Hall of the
Assembly, of the meanness of President Dupin, of the melting away of the
High Court, of the total inaction of the Council of State, of the sad
sitting held at the Mairie of the Tenth Arrondissement, of the Oudinot,
_fiasco_, of the decree of the deposition of the President, and of the
two hundred and twenty forcibly arrested and taken to the Quai d'Orsay.
He concluded in a manly style: "The duty of the Left was increasing
hourly. The morrow would probably prove decisive." He implored the
meeting to take this into consideration.
A workman added a fact. He had happened in the morning to be in the Rue
de Grenelle during the passage of the arrested members of the Assembly;
he was there at the moment when one of the commanders of the Chasseurs
de Vincennes had uttered these words, "Now it is the turn of those
gentlemen--the Red Representatives. Let them look out for themselves!"
One of the editors of the _Revolution_, Hennett de Kesler, who
afterwards became an intrepid exile, completed the information of
Mathieu (de la Drome). He recounted the action taken by two members of
the Assembly with regard to the so-called Minister of the Interior,
Morny, and the answer of the said Morny: "If I find any of the
Representatives behind the barricades, I will have them shot to the last
man," and that other saying of the same witty vagabond respecting the
members taken to the Quai d'Orsay, "These are the last Representatives
who will be made prisoners." He told us that a placard was at that very
moment being printed which declared that "Any one who should be found at
a secret meeting would be immediately shot." The placard, in truth,
appeared the next morning.
Baudin rose up. "The _coup d'etat_ redoubles its rage," exclaimed he.
"Citizens, let us redouble our energy!"
Suddenly a man in a blouse entered. He was out of breath. He had run
hard. He told us that he had just seen, and he repeated, had seen with
"his own eyes," in the Rue Popincourt, a regiment marching in silence,
and wending its way towards the blind alley of No. 82, that we were
surrounded, and that we were about to be attacked.
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