red the room in this
manner with bad news, it was nearly one o'clock--he himself has related
these details, to the honour of his master's calmness. He told the
Prince that the barricades in the centre of the town still held out,
and were increasing in number; that on the boulevards the cries of
'Down with the dictator' (he did not dare say 'Down with Soulouque'),
and hisses everywhere hailed the troops as they passed; that before
Galerie Jouffroy a major had been pursued by the crowd, and that at the
corner of the Cafe Cardinal a captain of the staff had been torn from
his horse. Louis Bonaparte half rose from his chair, and gazing fixedly
at the general, calmly said to him: 'Very well! let Saint-Arnaud be
told to execute my orders.'

"What were these orders?

"We shall see.

"Here we pause to reflect, and the narrator lays down his pen with a
species of hesitation and distress of mind. We are approaching the
abominable crisis of that mournful day, the 4th; we are approaching
that monstrous deed from which emerged the success of the _coup
d'etat_, dripping with blood. We are about to unveil the most
horrible of the premeditated acts of Louis Bonaparte; we are about to
reveal, to narrate, to describe what all the historiographers of the
2nd of December have concealed; what General Magnan carefully omitted
in his report; what, even at Paris, where these things were seen, men
scarcely dare to whisper to each other. We are about to enter upon the
ghastly.

"The 2nd of December is a crime covered with darkness, a coffin closed
and silent, from the cracks in which streams of blood gush forth.

"We are about to raise the coffin-lid."

II

"From an early hour in the morning,--for here (we insist upon this
point) premeditation is unquestionable,--from an early hour in the
morning, strange placards had been posted up at all the street-corners;
we have transcribed these placards, and our readers will remember them.
During sixty years that the cannon of revolution have, on certain days,
boomed through Paris, and that the government, when menaced, has had
recourse to desperate measures, nothing has ever been seen like these
placards. They informed the inhabitants that all assemblages, no matter
of what kind, would be dispersed by armed force, _without previous
warning_. In Paris, the metropolis of civilization, people do not
easily believe that a man will push his crime to the last extremity;
and, therefore, these