is waited, distrustful, for
the payment of his own shares; and, as this, of course, never took
place, the speculation in Socialist castles in the air fell flat. The
gold bars drew better. Bonaparte and his associates did not content
themselves with putting into their own pockets part of the surplus of
the seven millions over and above the bars that were to be drawn; they
manufactured false tickets; they sold, of Number 10 alone, fifteen to
twenty lots--a financial operation fully in the spirit of the "Society
of December 10"! The National Assembly did not here have before it the
fictitious President of the Republic, but Bonaparte himself in flesh
and blood. Here it could catch him in the act, not in conflict with
the Constitution, but with the penal code. When, upon Duprat's
interpellation, the National Assembly went over to the order of the day,
this did not happen simply because Girardin's motion to declare
itself "satisfied" reminded the party of Order of its own systematic
corruption: the bourgeois, above all the bourgeois who has been inflated
into a statesman, supplements his practical meanness with theoretical
pompousness. As statesman, he becomes, like the Government facing him, a
superior being, who can be fought only in a higher, more exalted manner.

Bonaparte-who, for the very reason of his being a "bohemian," a princely
slum-proletarian, had over the scampish bourgeois the advantage that he
could carry on the fight after the Assembly itself had carried him with
its own hands over the slippery ground of the military banquets, of the
reviews, of the "Society of December 10," and, finally, of the penal
code-now saw that the moment had arrived when he could move from the
seemingly defensive to the offensive. He was but little troubled by the
intermediate and trifling defeats of the Minister of Justice, of
the Minister of War, of the Minister of the Navy, of the Minister
of Finance, whereby the National Assembly indicated its growling
displeasure. Not only did he prevent the Ministers from resigning,
and thus recognizing the subordination of the executive power to the
Parliament; he could now accomplish what during the vacation of the
National Assembly he had commenced, the separation of the military power
from the Assembly--the deposition of Changarnier.

An Elysee paper published an order, issued during the month of May,
ostensibly to the First Military Division, and, hence, proceeding
from Changarnier, where