It is well known that the total slaughter in this butchery is unrecorded. Bonaparte has kept these figures hidden in darkness. Such is the habit of those who commit massacres. They are scarcely likely to allow history to certify the number of the victims. These statistics are an obscure multitude which quickly lose themselves in the gloom. One of the two colonels of whom we have had a glimpse in pages 223-225 of this work, has stated that his regiment alone had killed "at least 2,500 persons." This would be more than one person per soldier. We believe that this zealous colonel exaggerates. Crime sometimes boasts of its blackness. Lireux, a writer, arrested in order to be shot, and who escaped by a miracle, declares that he saw "more than 800 corpses." Towards four o'clock the post-chaises which were in the courtyard of the Elysée were unhorsed and put up. This extermination, which an English witness, Captain William Jesse, calls "a wanton fusillade," lasted from two till five o'clock. During these three terrible hours, Louis Bonaparte carried out what he had been premeditating, and completed his work. Up to that time the poor little "middle-class" conscience was almost indulgent. Well, what of it? It was a game at Prince, a species of state swindling, a conjuring feat on a large scale; the sceptics and the knowing men said, "It is a good joke played upon those idiots." Suddenly Louis Bonaparte grew uneasy and revealed all his policy. "Tell Saint-Arnaud to execute my orders." Saint-Arnaud obeyed, the _coup d'état_ acted according to its own code of laws, and from that appalling moment an immense torrent of blood began to flow across this crime. They left the corpses lying on the pavements, wild-looking, livid, stupefied, with their pockets turned inside out. The military murderer is thus condemned to mount the villainous scale of guilt. In the morning an assassin, in the evening a thief.