iwork, his own thought.
Whatever else he appropriates, the power of circumstances places in his
hands; whatever else he does, either circumstances do for him, or he
is content to copy from the deeds of others, but he posing before the
citizens with the official phrases about "Order," "Religion," "Family,"
"Property," and, behind him, the secret society of skipjacks and
picaroons, the society of disorder, of prostitution, and of theft,--that
is Bonaparte himself as the original author; and the history of the
"Society of December 10" is his own history. Now, then, it happened that
Representatives belonging to the party of order occasionally got under
the clubs of the Decembrists. Nay, more. Police Commissioner Yon, who
had been assigned to the National Assembly, and was charged with the
guardianship of its safety, reported to the Permanent Committee upon the
testimony of one Alais, that a Section of the Decembrists had decided
on the murder of General Changarnier and of Dupin, the President of the
National Assembly, and had already settled upon the men to execute the
decree. One can imagine the fright of Mr. Dupin. A parliamentary
inquest over the "Society of December 10," i. e., the profanation of
the Bonapartist secret world now seemed inevitable. Just before the
reconvening of the National Assembly, Bonaparte circumspectly dissolved
his Society, of course, on paper only. As late as the end of 1851,
Police Prefect Carlier vainly sought, in an exhaustive memorial, to move
him to the real dissolution of the Decembrists.

The "Society of December 10" was to remain the private army of Bonaparte
until he should have succeeded in converting the public Army into a
"Society of December 10." Bonaparte made the first attempt in this
direction shortly after the adjournment of the National Assembly, and he
did so with the money which he had just wrung from it. As a fatalist,
he lives devoted to the conviction that there are certain Higher Powers,
whom man, particularly the soldier, cannot resist. First among these
Powers he numbers cigars and champagne, cold poultry and garlic-sausage.
Accordingly, in the apartments of the Elysee, he treated first the
officers and under-officers to cigars and champagne, to cold poultry and
garlic-sausage. On October 3, he repeats this manoeuvre with the rank
and file of the troops by the review of St. Maur; and, on October 10,
the same manoeuvre again, upon a larger scale, at the army parade of
Sat