until finally that
situation is created which renders all retreat impossible, and the
conditions themselves cry out:

"Hic Rhodus, hic salta!" [#2 Here is Rhodes, leap here! An allusion to
Aesop's Fables.]

Every observer of average intelligence; even if he failed to follow step
by step the course of French development, must have anticipated that an
unheard of fiasco was in store for the revolution. It was enough to hear
the self-satisfied yelpings of victory wherewith the Messieurs Democrats
mutually congratulated one another upon the pardons of May 2d, 1852.
Indeed, May 2d had become a fixed idea in their heads; it had become a
dogma with them--something like the day on which Christ was to reappear
and the Millennium to begin had formed in the heads of the Chiliasts.
Weakness had, as it ever does, taken refuge in the wonderful; it
believed the enemy was overcome if, in its imagination, it hocus-pocused
him away; and it lost all sense of the present in the imaginary
apotheosis of the future, that was at hand, and of the deeds, that it
had "in petto," but which it did not yet want to bring to the scratch.
The heroes, who ever seek to refute their established incompetence
by mutually bestowing their sympathy upon one another and by pulling
together, had packed their satchels, taken their laurels in advance
payments and were just engaged in the work of getting discounted "in
partibus," on the stock exchange, the republics for which, in the
silence of their unassuming dispositions, they had carefully organized
the government personnel. The 2d of December struck them like a
bolt from a clear sky; and the 'peoples, who, in periods of timid
despondency, gladly allow their hidden fears to be drowned by the
loudest screamers, will perhaps have become convinced that the days are
gone by when the cackling of geese could save the Capitol.

The constitution, the national assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue
and the red republicans, the heroes from Africa, the thunder from
the tribune, the flash-lightnings from the daily press, the whole
literature, the political names and the intellectual celebrities, the
civil and the criminal law, the "liberte', egalite', fraternite',"
together with the 2d of May 1852--all vanished like a phantasmagoria
before the ban of one man, whom his enemies themselves do not pronounce
an adept at witchcraft. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only
for a moment, to the end that, before the eyes