s in this way that the "beards" dealt in
dark deeds of conspiracy at the Cafe de Seville. At the hour for absinthe
and mazagran a certain number of Fiesques and Catilines were grouped
around each table. At one of the tables in the foreground five old
"beards," whitened by political crime, were planning an infernal machine;
and in the back of the room ten robust hands had sworn upon the
billiard-table to arm themselves for regicide; only, as with all
"beards," there were necessarily some false ones among them, that is to
say, spies. All the plots planned at the Seville had miserably
miscarried.

The art of building barricades was also--you never would suspect
it!--very ardently and conscientiously studied. This special branch of
the science of fortification reckoned more than one Vauban and Gribeauval
among its numbers. "Professor of barricading," was a title honored at the
Cafe de Seville, and one that they would willingly have had engraved upon
their visiting-cards. Observe that the instruction was only theoretical;
doubtless out of respect for the policemen, they could not give entirely
practical lessons to the future rioters who formed the ground-work of the
business. The master or doctor of civil war could not go out with them,
for instance, and practise in the Rue Drouot. But he had one resource,
one way of getting out of it; namely, dominoes. No! you never would
believe what a revolutionary appearance these inoffensive mutton-bones
took on under the seditious hands of the habitues of the Cafe de Seville.
These miniature pavements simulated upon the marble table the subjugation
of the most complicated of barricades, with all sorts of bastions,
redans, and counterscarps. It was something after the fashion of the
small models of war-ships that one sees in marine museums. Any one, not
in the secret, would have supposed that the "beards" simply played
dominoes. Not at all! They were pursuing a course of technical
insurrection. When they roared at the top of their lungs "Five on all
sides!" certain players seemed to order a general discharge, and they had
a way of saying, "I can not!" which evidently expressed the despair of a
combatant who has burned his last cartridge. A "beard" in glasses and a
stovepipe hat, who had been refused in his youth at the Ecole
Polytechnique, was frightful in the rapidity and mathematical precision
with which he added up in three minutes his barricade of dominoes. When
this man "blocked th