s at him and says: "Succeed." This is
a judge; the judge looks at him, and smiles on him, and says:
"Succeed."

Thus, to escape the gendarmes,--therein consists henceforth the whole
moral law. To rob, to pillage, to poignard, to assassinate, all this is
criminal only when one is fool enough to allow himself to be caught.
Every man who meditates a crime has a constitution to violate, an oath
to break, an obstacle to destroy. In a word, take your measures well.
Be adroit. Succeed. The only guilty actions are the _coups_ that fail.

You put your hand in the pocket of a passer-by, in the evening, at
nightfall, in a lonely place; he seizes you; you let go; he arrests
you, and takes you to the guard-house. You are guilty; to the galleys!
You do not let go: you have a knife about you, you bury it in the man's
throat; he falls; he is dead; now take his purse, and make off. Bravo!
capitally done! You have shut the victim's mouth, the only witness who
could speak. Nobody has anything to say to you.

If you had only robbed the man, you would have been in the wrong; kill
him, and you are right.

Succeed, that is the point.

Ah! this is indeed alarming!

On the day when the human conscience shall lose its bearings, on the
day when success shall carry the day before that forum, all will be at
an end. The last moral gleam will reascend to heaven. Darkness will be
in the mind of man. You will have nothing to do but to devour one
another, wild beasts that you are!

With moral degradation goes political degradation. M. Bonaparte treats
the people of France like a conquered country. He effaces the
republican inscriptions; he cut down the trees of liberty, and makes
firewood of them. There was on Place Bourgogne a statue of the
Republic; he puts the pickaxe to it; there was on our coinage a figure
of the Republic, crowned with ears of corn; M. Bonaparte replaces it by
the profile of M. Bonaparte. He has his bust crowned and harangued in
the market-places, just as the tyrant Gessler made the people salute
his cap. The rustics in the faubourgs were in the habit of singing in
chorus, in the evening, as they returned from work; they used to sing
the great republican songs, the Marseillaise, the Chant du Depart; they
were ordered to keep silent; the faubourgers will sing no more; there
is amnesty only for obscenities and drunken songs. The triumph is so
complete, that they no longer keep within bounds. Only yesterday they
kept in hidin