at the general, calmly said to him: 'Very well! let Saint-Arnaud be told to execute my orders.' "What were these orders? "We shall see. "Here we pause to reflect, and the narrator lays down his pen with a species of hesitation and distress of mind. We are approaching the abominable crisis of that mournful day, the 4th; we are approaching that monstrous deed from which emerged the success of the _coup d'etat_, dripping with blood. We are about to unveil the most horrible of the premeditated acts of Louis Bonaparte; we are about to reveal, to narrate, to describe what all the historiographers of the 2nd of December have concealed; what General Magnan carefully omitted in his report; what, even at Paris, where these things were seen, men scarcely dare to whisper to each other. We are about to enter upon the ghastly. "The 2nd of December is a crime covered with darkness, a coffin closed and silent, from the cracks in which streams of blood gush forth. "We are about to raise the coffin-lid." II "From an early hour in the morning,--for here (we insist upon this point) premeditation is unquestionable,--from an early hour in the morning, strange placards had been posted up at all the street-corners; we have transcribed these placards, and our readers will remember them. During sixty years that the cannon of revolution have, on certain days, boomed through Paris, and that the government, when menaced, has had recourse to desperate measures, nothing has ever been seen like these placards. They informed the inhabitants that all assemblages, no matter of what kind, would be dispersed by armed force, _without previous warning_. In Paris, the metropolis of civilization, people do not easily believe that a man will push his crime to the last extremity; and, therefore, these notices had been looked upon as a means of intimidation that was hideous and barbarous, but almost ridiculous. "The public were wrong. These placards contained in germ Louis Bonaparte's whole plan. They were seriously meant. "One word as to the spot which is about to be the theatre of the unheard-of drama, prepared and perpetrated by the man of December.