honest men doubted the justice of a council of war, they were
silenced by the specious reasoning of men like M. de Beauchamp. Had
Jean been invited to assist in overturning the republic and to put
Philippe d'Orleans on the throne, he would have revolted. His
political ideals would have been outraged. Yet every act committed by
him and by his blind partisans tended directly, and were secretly
engineered by others, to that end.

Jean Marot in this was but a fair type of tens of thousands of his
intelligent but headstrong and misguided countrymen.

"In the street!"

Once in the street the following day, Jean forgot his serious
reflections of the previous night. It was Sunday, the chosen day of
battle by sea and land,--a day consecrated to violence and bloodshed
by the Paris mob. The students gathered at the divided rendezvous of
the Place Pantheon and the Place de l'Odeon. Many of them wore the
white boutonniere of the Jeunesse Royalistes, the tricolor, the red
rose of communism, or other badge of particular political belief, and
all carried canes, some of which were loaded and some of the sword
variety. Their leaders excitedly harangued them while the heavy squads
of police agents distributed in the vicinity watched the proceedings
without interference.

Indeed, the royalists and their allies had abundant reason to believe
the police force of Paris, officers and men, civil and military, in
sympathy with their movement against the republic. Not one of the many
street disturbances of the year past had been the spontaneous outburst
of popular anger that is the forerunner of revolution. On every
occasion they had been, as they were in this instance, the publicly
prearranged breaches of the peace in which the worst elements of the
Paris world were invited or hired to join. This was well known to the
government. It would have been easy and perfectly legal and wise to
have anticipated them by governmental authority. Acting under that
authority, a score or two of police agents could have dispersed all
preliminary gatherings. Under the eye of such a police force as we
have in New York any one of the numerous riots which disgraced the
streets of Paris during the pendency of the "Affaire" would have been
impossible.

The police of Paris, however, are French,--which is to say that they
are incapable of seeing their duty from a strictly impersonal point of
view, but are lax to the utmost indifference and partiality or brutal
t