on which he could live
for many years to come: "Tu fai conto sopra i beni, bisogna prima far il
conto sopra gli anni." [#11 "You count your property you should rather
count the years left to you."] In order not to make a mistake in the
years, they count by minutes. A crowd of fellows, of the best among whom
all that can be said is that one knows not whence he comes--a noisy,
restless "Boheme," greedy after plunder, that crawls about in gallooned
frocks with the same grotesque dignity as Soulonque's [#12 Soulonque was
the negro Emperor of the short-lived negro Empire of Hayti.] Imperial
dignitaries--, thronged the court crowded the ministries, and pressed
upon the head of the Government and of the Army. One can picture to
himself this upper crust of the "Society of December 10" by considering
that Veron Crevel [#13 Crevel is a character of Balzac, drawn after Dr.
Veron, the proprietor of the "Constitutional" newspaper, as a type of
the dissolute Parisian Philistine.] is their preacher of morality, and
Granier de Cassagnac their thinker. When Guizot, at the time he was
Minister, employed this Granier on an obscure sheet against the dynastic
opposition, he used to praise him with the term: "C'est le roi des
droles." [#14 "He Is the king of the clowns."] It were a mistake to
recall the days of the Regency or of Louis XV. by the court and the kit
of Louis Bonaparte's: "Often did France have a mistress-administration,
but never yet an administration of kept men." [#15 Madame de Girardin.]

Harassed by the contradictory demands of his situation, and compelled,
like a sleight-of-hands performer, to keep, by means of constant
surprises, the eyes of the public riveted upon himself as the substitute
of Napoleon, compelled, consequently, everyday to accomplish a sort of
"coup" on a small scale, Bonaparte throws the whole bourgeois social
system into disorder; he broaches everything that seemed unbroachable
by the revolution of 1848; he makes one set people patient under the
revolution and another anxious for it; he produces anarchy itself in the
name of order by rubbing off from the whole machinery of Government the
veneer of sanctity, by profaning it, by rendering it at once nauseating
and laughable. He rehearses in Paris the cult of the sacred coat of
Trier with the cult of the Napoleonic Imperial mantle. But when the
Imperial Mantle shall have finally fallen upon the shoulders of Louis
Bonaparte, then will also the iron statue o