The evening was passing away, and the Commission searching for a loophole by which to escape from a position become untenable, when Bouchet proposed to telegraph to Versailles that they would resign their powers into the hands of a Republican prefect. Poor issue of a great movement! They knew what the Republican prefects of M. Thiers were. The Commission, jaded, discouraged, let Bouchet draw up the telegram, when Landeck, Amouroux, and May arrived, sent, they said, by Paris. They spoke in the name of the great town. Bouchet wanted to verify their powers and contested their validity, which were indeed more than contestable, whereat the members of the Commission grew indignant. The magic name of victorious Paris resuscitated the enthusiasm of the first hours, and Bouchet left the place. At midnight the municipal council decided to maintain its resolution, and communicated this to the club of the National Guard, who immediately followed their example. At half-past one in the morning the delegates of the club informed the Commission that their powers were at an end. The Liberal bourgeoisie, coward-like, stole away, the Radicals backed out, and the people remained alone to face the reaction. This was the second phase of the movement. The most exalted of the three delegates, Landeck, became an authority paramount to the Commission. The cold-blooded Republicans who heard him and knew of his past dealings with the Imperialist police, suspected a Bonapartist under the grossly ignorant bully. He was indeed but a juggler, meant for the itinerant stage, of grotesque vanity, and shrinking from nothing, because ignorant of everything. The situation waxed tragic with this mountebank for a leader. G. Cremieux, unable to find another issue, was still for the solution of the evening before. On the 28th he wrote to the municipal council that the Commission was ready to retire, leaving them the responsibility of events, and urged his colleagues to release the hostages; this only rendered him the more suspected of moderatism. Closely watched, threatened, he lost heart at these disputes, and that same evening left the prefecture. His secession divested the Commission of all authority. It succeeded in discovering his retreat, made an appeal to his devotion to the cause, and led him back to the prefecture, there to resume his strange part of a chief at once captive and responsible. The municipal council did not answer G. Cremieux' letter and on the 29th the Commission renewed its proposal. The council still remained silent. In the evening 400 delegates of the National Guard, met at the museum, decided to federate the battalions, and appointed a commission charged to negotiate between the Hotel-de-Ville and the prefecture. But these delegates represented only the revolutionary element of the battalions, and the Hotel-de-Ville plunged more and more into a slough of despond.