se,
industry, and goodwill, the decadence of France. There worked the bought,
fed, and obliging public men;--read prostituted. Even literature was
compounded there as we have shown; Vieillard was a classic of 1830, Morny
created Choufleury, Louis Bonaparte was a candidate for the Academy.
Strange place. Rambouillet's hotel mingled itself with the house of
Bancal. The Elysee has been the laboratory, the counting-house, the
confessional, the alcove, the den of the reign. The Elysee assumed to
govern everything, even the morals--above all the morals. It spread the
paint on the bosom of women at the same time as the color on the faces of
the men. It set the fashion for toilette and for music. It invented the
crinoline and the operetta. At the Elysee a certain ugliness was
considered as elegance; that which makes the countenance noble was there
scoffed at, as was that which makes the soul great; the phrase, "human
face divine" was ridiculed at the Elysee, and it was there that for
twenty years every baseness was brought into fashion--effrontery
included.

History, whatever may be its pride, is condemned to know that the Elysee
existed. The grotesque side does not prevent the tragic side. There is at
the Elysee a room which has seen the second abdication, the abdication
after Waterloo. It is at the Elysee that Napoleon the First ended and
that Napoleon the Third began. It is at the Elysee that Dupin appeared to
the two Napoleons; in 1815 to depose the Great, in 1851 to worship the
Little. At this last epoch this place was perfectly villainous. There no
longer remained one virtue there. At the Court of Tiberius there was
still Thraseas, but round Louis Bonaparte there was nobody. If one sought
Conscience, one found Baroche; if one sought Religion, one found
Montalembert.

[14] Better known afterwards as Persigny.

CHAPTER V.

A WAVERING ALLY

During this terribly historical morning of the 4th of December, a day the
master was closely observed by his satellites, Louis Bonaparte had shut
himself up, but in doing so he betrayed himself. A man who shuts himself
up meditates, and for such men to meditate is to premeditate. What could
be the premeditation of Louis Bonaparte? What was working in his mind.
Questions which all asked themselves, two persons excepted,--Morny, the
man of thought; Saint-Arnaud, the man of action.

Louis Bonaparte claimed, justly, a knowledge of men. He prided himself
upon it, and from a c