ent fall in this manner.

February had blown upon the Deputies of the legal country, and the
Deputies had vanished. M. Sauzet had sunk down behind the tribune, and
had gone away without even taking his hat.

Bonaparte, the other, the first, the true Bonaparte, had made the "Five
Hundred" step out of the windows of the Orangery of Saint Cloud,
somewhat embarrassed with their large mantles.

Cromwell, the oldest of the Bonapartes, when he achieved his Eighteenth
Brumaire, encountered scarcely any other resistance than a few
imprecations from Milton and from Ludlaw, and was able to say in his
boorishly gigantic language, "I have put the King in my knapsack and the
Parliament in my pocket."

We must go back to the Roman Senate in order to find true Curule chairs.

The Legislative Assembly, let us repeat, to its honor, did not lose
countenance when facing the abyss. History will keep an account of it.
After having betrayed so many things, it might have been feared that
this Assembly would end by betraying itself. It did nothing of the kind.
The Legislature, one is obliged to remember, had committed faults upon
faults; the Royalist majority had, in the most odious manner, persecuted
the Republican minority, which was bravely doing its duty in denouncing
it to the people; this Assembly had had a very long cohabitation and a
most fatal complicity with the Man of Crime, who had ended by strangling
it as a robber strangles his concubine in his bed; but whatever may be
said of this fateful Assembly, it did not exhibit that wretched
vanishing away which Louis Bonaparte hoped for; it was not a coward.

This is due to its having originated from universal suffrage. Let us
mention this, for it is an instructive lesson. The virtue of this
universal suffrage, which had begotten the Assembly and which the
Assembly had wished to slay, it felt in itself to its last hour.

The sap of a whole people does not spread in vain throughout an
Assembly, even throughout the most decrepit. On the decisive day this
sap asserts itself.

The Legislative Assembly, laden as it may be with formidable
responsibilities, will, perhaps, be less overwhelmed than it deserves by
the reprobation of posterity.

Thanks to universal suffrage, which it had deceived, and which
constituted its faith and its strength at the last moment, thanks to the
Left, which it had oppressed, scoffed at, calumniated, and decimated,
and which cast on it the glorious reflectio