An hour after the appearance of such a circular, the Prefect of Police ought to have been prosecuted. But nothing was done. M. Gisquet answered a blunder by a libel. It was no longer the agents of the Government who poisoned the fountains and wine casks to reduce the population and turn attention away from political affairs, it was the Republicans who threw bottles of poison over the butchers' stalls to depopulate the Government of Louis-Philippe! One could understand the first accusation, which sprang out of ignorance; but the second! which came from authority and from such a quarter! a quarter which ought to be the best informed on such affairs as these! The people only asked not to have to believe in the presence of the plague: that invisible enemy, which struck from the heart of the clouds, irritated the people by its invisibility. They refused to believe that one could die of an atmospheric poison, from so pure a sky and so radiant a sun. A material, visible, palpable cause would do its business much more effectually--at all events, revenge could be taken on a tangible cause. Placards containing nearly the same accusations were pasted up. The same day crowds collected round these placards and then they took themselves off to the barriers. Poor unfortunate wretches were knocked down by sticks, assassinated by knife-thrusts, torn by the nails of women and the teeth of dogs. A man would be pointed at with a finger--pursued, attacked and killed! I saw one of these terrible executions from a distance. The crowd moved towards the barrier: one could count the heads by the thousand, each one a wave of that angry ocean; a great number of butcher-boys with their aprons spotted with blood were mixed up in that frightful sea, each apron among all those waves like a crest of foam. Paris threatened to become worse than a great charnel-house: it threatened to become a vast slaughter-house. The prefect was obliged to retract and to recognise that an assassin, a murderer, a poisoner who escaped all capture, had broken loose, and was hiding himself in Paris. That assassin, murderer and poisoner was the cholera! Oh! who ever saw Paris at that time would forget it, with its implacable blue sky, its mocking sun, its deserted walks, its solitary boulevards, its streets strewn with hearses and haunted by phantoms? Places of public entertainment looked like immense tombs. Harel put the following paragraph in the newspapers during the performances of _Dix ans de la vie d'une femme:_-- "It has been noticed with surprise that theatres are the only public places where, whatever the number of spectators, no case of cholera had yet appeared. We present this INCONTESTABLE fact for scientific investigation."