e-Mars secretly witnessed,--the terrible night
tragedies which dismayed and dishonoured it,--history cannot yet
reveal. Thanks to Louis Bonaparte, this revered field of the Federation
may in future be called Aceldama. One of the unhappy soldiers whom the
man of the 2nd of December transformed into executioners, relates with
horror, and beneath his breath, that in a single night the number of
people shot was not less than eight hundred.

Louis Bonaparte hastened to dig a grave and threw in his crime. A few
shovelfuls of earth, a sprinkling of holy water by a priest, and all
was said. And now, the imperial carnival dances above that grave.

Is this all? Can it be that this is the end? Does God allow and
acquiesce in such burials? Believe it not. Some day, beneath the feet
of Bonaparte, between the marble pavements of the Elysee or the
Tuileries, this grave will suddenly re-open, and those bodies will come
forth, one after another, each with its wound, the young man stricken
to the heart, the old man shaking his aged head pierced by a ball, the
mother put to the sword, with her infant killed in her arms,--all of
them upstanding, pallid, terrible to see, and with bleeding eyes fixed
on their assassin.

Awaiting that day, and even now, history has begun to try you, Louis
Bonaparte. History rejects your official list of the dead, and your
_pieces justificatives_.

History asserts that they lie, and that you lie.

You have tied a bandage over the eyes of France and put a gag in her
mouth. Wherefore?

Was it to do righteous deeds? No, but crimes. The evil-doer is afraid
of the light.

You shot people by night, on the Champ-de-Mars, at the Prefecture, at
the Palais de Justice, on the squares, on the quays, everywhere.

You say you did not.

I say you did.

In dealing with you we have a right to surmise, to suspect, and to
accuse.

What you deny, we have a right to believe; your denial is equivalent to
affirmation.

Your 2nd of December is pointed at by the public conscience. Nobody
thinks of it without inwardly shuddering. What did you do in those dark
hours?

Your days are ghastly, your nights are suspicious. Ah! man of darkness
that you are!

* * * *

Let us return to the butchery on the boulevard, to the words, "Let my
orders be executed!" and to the day of the 4th.

Louis Bonaparte, during the evening of that day, must have compared
himself to Charles X, who refuse