d
and twenty-five thousand dollars per annum, and he was to have
much the same powers as the President of the United States.

There were two principal presidential candidates,--Prince Louis
Napoleon, who had taken his seat in the Assembly; and Cavaignac,
who had the power of Government on his side, and was sanguine of
election. The prince proclaimed in letters and placards his deep
attachment to the Republic, and denounced as his enemies and slanderers
all those who said he was not firmly resolved to maintain the
constitution.

The result of the election showed Louis Napoleon to have had five
and a half millions of votes; Cavaignac one and a half million;
Lamartine, who six months before had been a popular idol, had nineteen
thousand.

[Illustration: _LOUIS NAPOLEON._ (The Prince President.)]

An early friend of Louis Napoleon, who seems to have been willing
to talk freely of the playmate of her childhood, thus spoke of
him to an English traveller.

"He is," she said, "a strange being. His mind wants _keeping_.
A trifle close to his eyes hides from him large objects at a
distance.... The great progress in political knowledge made by
the higher classes in France from 1815 to 1848 is lost on him.
When we met in 1836, after three years' separation, I was struck
by his backwardness in political knowledge. Up to 1848 he never
had lived in France except as a child or a captive. His opinions
and feelings were those of the French masses from 1799 to 1812.
Though these opinions had been modified in the minds of the higher
classes, they were, in 1848, those of the multitude, who despise
parliamentary government, despise the pope, despise the priests,
delight in profuse expenditure, delight in war, hold the Rhine to
be our national frontier, and that it is our duty to seize all
that lies on the French side. The people and he were of one mind. I
have no doubt that the little he may have heard, and the less that
he attended to, from the persons he saw between 1848 and 1852 about
liberty, self-government, economy, the supremacy of the Assembly,
respect for foreign nations, and fidelity to treaties, appeared
to him the silliest talk imaginable. So it would have appeared
to all in the lower classes of France; so it would have appeared
to the army, which is drawn from those classes, and exaggerates
their political views."

"The prince president is romantic, impulsive, and _bizarre_," said
one of his officials to the same Engli