This simile made a marked impression. The debate was prolonged, and the delegates of the Committee withdrew, no conclusion having been arrived at. Thereupon, without preamble, like a Jack-in-the-box, Felix Pyat jumped up and proposed the abolition of the conscription. On the 3rd March he had stolen away from the National Assembly, as he had on the 31st October deserted the Hotel-de-Ville, and, a few days after, sneaked out of prison. On the 18th March he did not stir, while Delescluze had joined the revolution from the first day. Felix Pyat waited for the triumph, and on the eve of the elections came to sound the timbrel before the Committee, "which teaches modesty to the proudest name and inspires men of genius with a feeling of inferiority." Elected by about 12,000 votes in the tenth arrondissement, he was now forward to take his seat at the Hotel-de-Ville. The hour awaited for twenty years had at last struck; he was about to tread the boards. Amidst the crowd of dramatists, thaumaturgists, romanticists, visionaries, and Jacobin relics, trailing since 1830 at the heels of the social revolution, his business had been that of appeals to regicide, to revolutionary chouannerie, of epistles, allegories, toasts, invocations, evocations, pieces of rhetoric on the events of the day, tinkering the old Montagnard wares, and doing them up with a little humanitarian varnish. Under the Empire his rabid manifestoes had been the joy of the police and of the Bonapartist journals, excellent sops to throw to the people, who could not extract from them a practical idea or a grain of sense. This intoxication was more than half-feigned. The dishevelled madman of the stage behind the scenes turned crafty, trickish, and wary to a degree. At bottom he was only a splenetic sceptic, sincere only in his self-idolatry. He came to the Commune his pockets crammed with decrees. When he read his motion, it was lustily cheered by the romanticists and passed at once. Yet still in the morning the Council had intimated nothing of the sort, but only stated in the proclamation in which they presented themselves to Paris: "To-day the decision on house-rents, to-morrow that on the overdue bills, the public services re-established and simplified, and the National Guards reorganised, these are our first acts." And now it abruptly encroached upon national affairs. Commune in the morning, Constituent Assembly in the evening. If they wanted to change the revolution from a communal into a national one, they ought to have said so, boldly set forth their whole programme, and demonstrated to France the necessity of their attempt. But what signified this decree, improvised at random, without a preliminary declaration and without a sequel? This _quid pro quo_ was not even taken up. Under pretext of avoiding parliamentarism, the matters at issue were hurried over.