rcumstances be
but a council of war, every one of whose decisions was canvassed in
public and made the enemy still wiser than he was before? Of course, the
Empress felt certain that she would be able to dismiss it as easily as
it had been summoned; she evidently did not remember the fable of the
horse which had invited the man to get on his back in order to fight the
stag. There is not the slightest doubt that, as I have already remarked,
the Empress's main purpose was the overthrow of the Ollivier
administration; if proof were wanted, the evidence of the men who
overthrew the Empire would be sufficient to establish the fact, and not
one, but half a dozen, have openly stated that the defeat of the
Ollivier ministry was accomplished with the tacit approval of the court
party: _read_, "the party of the Empress," to which I have referred
before.

The list of the Empress's blunders, involuntary or the reverse, is too
long to be transcribed in detail here; I return to my impressions of men
and things after my meeting with General Beaufort d'Hautpoul in the Rue
de Rivoli.

I do not suppose that in the whole of Paris there were a dozen sensible
men who still cherished any illusions with regard to the possibility of
retrieving the disasters by a dash into the enemy's country. The cry of
"A Berlin!" had been finally abandoned even by the most chauvinistic.
But the hope still remained that the Prussians would be thrust back from
the "sacred soil of France" by some brilliant coup de main, although I
am positive that the Empire would have been doomed just the same if
that hope had been realized. Among those who had faith in the coup de
main were M. Paul de Cassagnac and, curiously enough, General Beaufort
d'Hautpoul. He had suddenly conceived great hopes with regard to
Bazaine. M. de Cassagnac seriously contemplated enlisting in the
Zouaves. Strange to relate, M. Paul de Cassagnac, in spite of his
well-known attachment to the Imperialist cause, was looked upon, by the
most determined opponents of that cause among the masses, as a man to be
trusted and consulted in a non-official way. I remember being on the
Boulevard one evening after the affair at Beaumont, when the rage of the
population was even stronger than after the defeats at Woerth and
Forbach. All of a sudden we perceived a dense group swaying towards
us--we were between the Rues Laffite and Le Peletier--and in the centre
towered the tall figure of M. de Cassagnac. For a