oody proofs, on which the fingers of
the corpse were still closed. A poor old man, with white hair, was
lying in the middle of the road, with his umbrella at his side. His
elbow almost touched a young man in patent leather boots and yellow
gloves, who had his eye-glass still in his eye. A few steps away, with
her head on the sidewalk, and her feet in the road, lay a woman of the
people, who had attempted to escape, with her child in her arms. Both
were dead; but the mother still tightly grasped her child.'

"Ah! you will tell me, M. Bonaparte, that you are very sorry, but that
it was an unfortunate affair; that in presence of Paris, ready to rise,
it was necessary to adopt a decided course, and that you were forced to
this extremity; that, as regards the _coup d'etat_, you were in debt;
that your ministers were in debt; that your aides-de-camp were in debt;
that your footmen were in debt; that you were answerable for them all;
and that, deuce take it! a man cannot be a prince without spending,
from time to time, a few millions too much; that one must amuse one's
self and enjoy life a bit; that the Assembly was to blame for not
having understood this, and for seeking to restrict you to two paltry
millions a year, and, what is more, to force you to resign your
authority at the expiration of your four years, and to execute the
Constitution; that, after all, you could not leave the Elysee to enter
the debtors' prison at Clichy; that you had in vain had recourse to
those little expedients which are provided for by Article 405; that
exposure was at hand, that the demagogical press was chattering, that
the matter of the gold ingots threatened to become known, that you were
bound to respect the name of Napoleon, and that, on my word! having no
other alternative, rather than become one of the vulgar swindlers named
in the code, you preferred to be one of the great assassins of history!

"So then, instead of polluting, this blood has purified you! Very good.

"I resume.

VIII

"When all was finished, Paris came to see the sight. The people flocked
in crowds to those terrible places; no one interfered with them. This
was what the butcher wanted. Louis Bonaparte had not done all this to
hide it afterwards.

"The southern side of the boulevard was covered with torn cartridge
wads; the sidewalk on the northern side disappeared beneath the mortar
torn from the fronts of the houses by the bullets, and was as white as
if