XIV. still less is it true that the representative body was CHAP. engaged in hatching plots against the President; and although the army, remembering the humiliations of 1848, was in ill-humour with the people, and was willing upon any fit occasion to act against them, there was no general officer of any repute who would consent to fire a shot without what French Commanders deemed to be the one lawful warrant for action-an order from the Minister of War. Louis parte. But the President of the republic was Prince Charles Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the statutory heir of the Bonafirst French Emperor.* The election which made him the chief of the State had been conducted with perfect fairness; and since it happened that in former years he had twice engaged in enterprises which aimed at the throne of France, he had good right to infer that the millions of citizens who elected him into the Presidency were willing to use his ambition as a means of restoring to France a monarchical form of government. But if he had been open in disclosing the ambition which was almost cast upon him by the circumstances of his birth, he had been as successful as the first Brutus in passing for a man of a poor intellect. Both in France and in England, at that time, men in general imagined him to be dull. When he talked, the flow of his ideas was sluggish: his features were opaque; and, after years of dreary studies, the writings evolved by his thoughtful, long-pondering mind had not shed much light on the world. Even the * i. e., by the Senatus-Consulte of 1804. CHAP. strange ventures in which he had engaged had failed XIV. to win towards him the interest which commonly attaches to enterprise. People in London who were fond of having gatherings of celebrated characters never used to present him to their friends as a serious pretender to a throne, but rather as though he were a balloon - man who had twice had a fall from the skies, and was still in some measure alive. Yet the more men knew him in England, the more they liked him. He entered into English pursuits, and rode fairly to hounds. He was friendly, social, good-humoured, and willing enough to talk freely about his views upon the throne of France. The sayings he uttered about his 'destiny' were addressed (apparently as a matter of policy) to casual acquaintance; but to his intimate friends he used the language of a calculating and practical aspirant to Empire. The opinion which men had formed of his ability in the period of exile was not much altered by his return to France: for in the Assembly his apparent want of mental power caused the world to regard him as harmless, and in the chair of the President he commonly seemed to be torpid. But there were always a few who believed in his capacity; and observant men had latterly remarked that from time to time there appeared a State Paper, understood to be the work of the President, which teemed with thought, and which showed that the writer, standing solitary and apart from the gregarious nation of which he was the chief, was able to contemplate it as something XIV. external to himself. His long, endless study of the CHAP. mind of the First Napoleon had caused him to adopt and imitate the Emperor's habit of looking down upon the French people, and treating the mighty nation as a substance to be studied and controlled by a foreign brain. Indeed, during the periods of his imprisonment and of his exile, the relations between him and the France of his studies were very like the relations between an anatomist and a corpse. He lectured upon it; he dissected its fibres; he explained its functions; he showed how beautifully Nature, in her infinite wisdom, had adapted it to the service of the Bonapartes; and how, without the fostering care of those same Bonapartes, the creature was doomed to degenerate, and to perish out of the world. If his intellect was of a poorer quality than men supposed it to be at the time of the Anglo-French alliance, it was much above the low gauge which people used to assign to it in the earlier period which began in 1836 and ended at the close of 1851. That which had so long veiled his cleverness from the knowledge of mankind, was the repulsive nature of the science at which he laboured. Many men before him had suffered themselves to bring craft into politics; many more, toiling in humbler grades, had applied their cunning skill to the conflicts which engage courts of law; but no living man perhaps, except Prince Louis Bonaparte, had passed the hours of a studious youth, and the prime of a thoughtful manhood, in contriving how to apply stratagem to the science of jurisprudence. It was not, perhaps, VOL. I. Р CHAP. from natural baseness that his mind took this bent. XIV. The inclination to sit and sit planning for the attainment of some object of desire-this, indeed, was in his nature; but the inclination to labour at the task of making law an engine of deceit this did not come perforce with his blood. Yet it came with his parentage. It is true, he might have determined to reject the indication given him by the accident of his birth, and to remain a private citizen; but when once he resolved to become a pretender to the imperial throne, he of course had to try and see how it was possible -how it was possible in the midst of this century -that the coarse Bonaparte yoke of 1804 could be made to sit kindly upon the neck of France; and France being a European nation, and the yoke being in substance a yoke such as Tartars make for Chinese, it followed that the accommodating of the one to the other was only to be effected by guile. Therefore, by the sheer exigencies of his inheritance rather than by inborn wickedness, Prince Louis was driven to be a contriver; and to expect him to be loyal to France without giving up his pretensions altogether, would be as inconsistent as to say that the heir of the first Perkin might undertake to revive the fleeting glories of the House of Warbeck, and yet refrain from imposture. For years the Prince pursued his strange calling, and by the time his studies were over he had become highly skilled. Long before the moment had come for bringing his crooked science into use, he had learnt how to frame a Constitution which should XIV. seem to enact one thing and really enact another. CHA P. He knew how to put the word 'jury' in laws which robbed men of their freedom; he could set the snare which he called 'universal suffrage;' he knew how to strangle a nation in the night-time with a thing he called a Plebiscite.' The lawyer-like ingenuity which had thus been evoked for purposes of jurisprudence could, of course, be applied to the composition of State Papers and to political writings of all kinds; and the older Prince Louis grew, the more this odd accomplishment of his was used to subserve his infirmities. It was his nature to remain long in suspense, not merely between similar, but even between opposite plans of action. This weakness grew upon him with his years; and his conscience being used to stand neuter in these mental conflicts, he never could end his doubt by seeing that one course was honest and the other not; so, in order to be able to linger safely in his suspense, he had to be always making resting-places upon which for a time he might be able to stand undecided. Just as the indolent man becomes clever in framing excuses for his delays, so Prince Louis, because he was so often hesitating between the right and the left, became highly skilled in contriving not merely ambiguous phrases, but ambiguous schemes of action. Partly from habits acquired in the secret societies of the Italian Carbonari, partly from long years passed in prison, and partly too, as he once said, from his intercourse with the calm, self-possessed men of |