What you deny, we have a right to believe; your denial is equivalent to affirmation. Your 2nd of December is pointed at by the public conscience. Nobody thinks of it without inwardly shuddering. What did you do in those dark hours? Your days are ghastly, your nights are suspicious. Ah! man of darkness that you are! * * * * Let us return to the butchery on the boulevard, to the words, "Let my orders be executed!" and to the day of the 4th. Louis Bonaparte, during the evening of that day, must have compared himself to Charles X, who refused to burn Paris, and to Louis Philippe, who would not shed the people's blood, and he must have done himself the justice to admit that he is a great politician. A few days later, General T----, formerly in the service of one of the sons of King Louis Philippe, came to the Elysee. As soon as Louis Bonaparte caught sight of him, the comparison we have just pointed out suggesting itself to him, he cried out to the general, exultingly: "Well?" Louis Bonaparte is in very truth the man who said to one of his former ministers, who was our own informant: "_Had I been Charles X, and had I, during the days of July, caught Laffitte, Benjamin Constant, and Lafayette, I would have had them shot like dogs._" On the 4th of December, Louis Bonaparte would have been dragged that very night from the Elysee, and the law would have prevailed, had he been one of those men who recoil before a massacre. Fortunately for him, he had no such scruples. What signified a few dead bodies, more or less? Nonsense! kill! kill at random! cut them down! shoot, cannonade, crush, smash! Strike terror for me into this hateful city of Paris! The _coup d'etat_ was in a bad way; this great homicide restored its spirit. Louis Bonaparte had nearly ruined himself by his felony; he saved himself by his ferocity. Had he been only a Faliero, it was all over with him; fortunately he was a Caesar Borgia. He plunged with his crime into a river of gore; one less culpable would have sunk, he swam across. Such was his success as it is called. He is now on the other bank, striving to wipe himself dry, dripping with the blood which he mistakes for the purple, and demanding the Empire. II SEQUEL OF CRIMES Such a man is this malefactor!