CHAP. exactly what Louis Bonaparte did. The transaction. XIV. could not be concealed, and the imperial historian

6

6

seems to have thought that, upon the whole, the best course was to give it an air of classic grandeur by describing the soldiers as the 'conquerors' of a rugged Greek word, and by calling a French coin an obolus.' 'There remained,' said he, to the President, out of all his personal fortune, out of all 'his patrimony, a sum of fifty thousand francs. He knew that in certain memorable circumstances the troops had faltered in the presence of insurrection, more from being famished than from being defeated; so he took all that remained to him, even 'to his last crown-piece, and charged Colonel Fleury 'to go to the soldiers, conquerors of demagogy, and distribute to them, brigade by brigade, and man by Iman, this his last obolus.'* The President had said, in one of his addresses to the army of Paris, that he would not bid them advance, but would himself go the foremost and ask them to follow him. If it was becoming to address empty playactor's words of that sort to real soldiers, it certainly was not the duty of the President to act upon them; for there could not well be any such engagement in the streets of Paris as would make it right for a literary man (though he was also the chief of the State) to go and affect to put himself at the head of an army inured to war; but still there was a contrast between what was said and what was done, which makes a man smile as he passes. The President had vowed he would lead the * Granier de Cassaignac, vol. ii. p. 431.

XIV.

soldiers against the foe, and instead, he sent them all CHAP. his money. There is no reason to suppose that the change of plan was at all displeasing to the troops; and this bribing of the armed men is only adverted to here as a means of getting at the real state of the President's mind, and thereby tracing up to its cause the massacre of the 4th of December.

*

the 5th of

Another clue, leading the same way, is to be He even signed the found in the Decree by which the President enacted decree of that combats with insurgents at home should count December. for the honour and profit of the troops in the same way as though they were fought against a foreign enemy. It is true that this decree was not issued until the massacre of the 4th was over, but of course the temper in which a man encounters danger is to be gathered in part from his demeanour immediately after the worst moment of trial; and when it is found that the chief of a proud and mighty nation was capable of putting his hand to a paper of this sort on the 5th of December, some idea may be formed of what his sensations were on the noon of the day before, when the agony of being in fear had not as yet been succeeded by the indecorous excitement of escape.

Jerome

Whilst Prince Louis Bonaparte was hugging the State of knees of the soldiers, his uncle Jerome Bonaparte fell Bonainto so painful a condition as to be unable to maintain parte. his self-control, and he suffered himself to publish a letter in which he not only disclosed his alarm, but even showed that he was preparing to separate him

* Decree of the 5th, inserted in the 'Moniteur' of the 7th Dec. VOL. I.

X

XIV.

CHAP. self from his nephew; for he made it appear (as he could do, perhaps, with strict truth) that although he had got into danger by showing himself in public with the President on the 2d of December, he was innocent of the plot, and a stranger to the counsels of the Elysée.* His son (now called Prince NapoNapoleon, leon) was really, they say, a strong disapprover of Jerome. the President's acts, and it was natural that he should

Natural

anxiety of

son of

Bodily state of Maupas.

be most unwilling to be put to death or otherwise ill-treated upon the theory that he was the cousin and therefore the accomplice of Louis, for of that theory he wholly and utterly denied the truth. Any man, however firm, might well resolve that, happen what might to him, he would struggle hard to avoid being executed by mistake; and it seems unfair to cast blame on Prince Napoleon for trying to disconnect his personal destiny from that of the endangered men at the Elysée, whose counsels he had not shared. Still, the sense of being cast loose by the other Bonapartes could not but be discouraging to Prince Louis, and to those who had thrown in their lot with him.

Maupas, or De Maupas, was a man of a fine, large, robust frame, and with florid, healthy looks; but it sometimes happens that a spacious and strong-look

* The letter will be found in the Annual Register.' It seems to have been sent at 10 o'clock at night on the 4th of December; but the writer evidently did not know that the insurrection at that time was so near its end as it really was, and his letter may therefore be taken as a fair indication of the state of his mind in the earlier part of the day. The advice and the mild remonstrance contained in the letter might have been given in private by a man who had not lost his calm, but the fact of allowing such a letter to be public discloses Jerome's motives.

XIV.

ing body of that sort is not so safe a tabernacle as it CHA P. seems for man's troubled spirit. It is said that the bodily strength of Maupas collapsed in the hour of danger, and that, at a critical part of the time between the night of the 2d of December and the massacre of the 4th, he had the misfortune to fall ill.

Finally, it must be repeated that on that 4th of December the army of Paris was kept in a state of inaction during all the precious hours which elapsed between the earliest dawn of the morning and two o'clock in the afternoon.

for the

anxiety of the plotters, and of

Magnan

and the under him. generals

These are signs that the brethren of the Elysée Grounds were aghast at what they had done, and aghast at what they had to do. And it is obvious that Magnan and the twenty Generals who had embraced one another on the 27th of November, were now more involved in the danger of the plot than at first they might have expected to be; for the isolation in which the President was left, for want of men of character and station who would consent to come and stand round him, must have made all these Generals feel

that even the sovereign warrant of an order from

6

the Minister of War' was a covering which had become very thin.

anxious

upon

Now by nature the French people are used to go in Effect of flocks; and in their army there is not that social dif- suspense ference between the officers and the common soldiers French which is the best contrivance hitherto discovered for troops. intercepting the spread of a panic or any other bewildering impulse. With their troops, any impulse,

whether of daring or fear, will often dart like light

XIV.

CHAP. ning from man to man, and quickly involve the whole mass. Generally, perhaps, a panic in an army ascends from the ranks. On this day, the panic, it seems, went downwards. For six hours the army had been kept waiting and waiting under arms within a few hundred yards of the barricades which it was to attack. The order to advance did not come. Somewhere there was hesitation, and the Generals could not but know that even a little hesitation at such a time was both a sign and a cause of danger; but when they saw it continuing through all the morning hours of a short December day, they could hardly have failed to apprehend that the plot of the Elysée was collapsing for want of support, and they could not but know that, if this dread were well founded, their fate was likely to be a hard one.

The temperament of Frenchmen is better fitted for the hour of combat than for the endurance of this sort of protracted tension; and the anxiety of men of their race, when they are much perturbed and kept in long suspense, will easily degenerate into that kind of alarm which is apt to become ferocious. This was the kind of stress to which the troops were put on that 4th of December; and in the case of Magnan and the Generals under him, the pangs of having to wait upon the brink of action for more than twothirds of a day were sharpened by a sense of political danger; for they felt that if, after all, the scheme of the Elysée should fail, their meeting of the 27th might cause them to be brought to trial. Any one knowing what those twenty-one Generals had on