After a speech of Bouchet, the deputy of the _procureur de la Republique_, Gaston Cremieux reconsidering his first impulsive step, and accompanied by the delegates of the club, repaired to the El Dorado. There he read and made comments upon the _Officiel_ of Paris, which he had got from the prefect, and calmed the excitement. "The Government of Versailles have raised their crutch against what they call the insurrection of Paris; but it has broken in their hands, and their attempt has brought forth the Commune. Let us swear that we are united for the defence of the Government of Paris, the only one that we recognise." They separated, ready for resistance, but resolved to bide their time. Thus the excited population still checked itself when the prefect goaded it by the most stupid of provocations. This Admiral Cosnier, a distinguished naval officer, but politically a mere cipher, quite out of his element in these surroundings, where he had only just arrived, was the passive tool of the reaction, which since the 4th September had already several times fallen out with the National Guard--the _civiques_--who had proclaimed the Commune and expulsed the Jesuits. The Rev. Father Tissier, though absent, was still its leader. The moderation of the town it mistook for cowardice. Like M. Thiers on the 17th, it believed itself strong enough to make a brilliant stroke. In the evening the Admiral held council with the mayor, Bories, an old wreck of 1848, who had dabbled in all the clerico-liberal coalitions, the _procureur de la Republique_, Guibert, a timid trimmer, and General Espivent de la Villeboisnet, one of those cruel caricatures in which the civil wars of South America abound. An obtuse Legitimist, a besotted zealot, the Syllabus incarnate, a carpet knight and former member of the Mixed Commissions of 1851, during the war he had been expelled from Lille by the people, indignant alike at his utter incapacity and his antecedents. He brought the council the _mot d'ordre_ of the priests and reactionists, and proposed convoking the National Guards to make an armed manifestation in favour of Versailles. He would have asked for more, no doubt, but the garrison was solely composed of waifs of the army of the East and of a few disbanded artillerists. Cosnier, quite led astray, approved of the manifestation, and gave orders to the mayor and to the colonel of the National Guards to prepare for it.