"I could easily find a pretext, but I prefer to give you my real reason: I did not want the banquets because I did not want a revolution; and I venture to say that hardly any of those who sat down to the banquets would have done so had they foreseen, as I did, the events to which these would lead. The only difference I can see between you and myself is that I knew what you were doing while you did not know it yourselves." This bold profession of anti-revolutionary had been preceded by one of republican faith; the sincerity of the one seemed to bear witness to that of the other; the meeting laughed and applauded. My adversaries were scoffed at, and I came off triumphant. I had won the agricultural population of the department by my address; I won the Cherbourg workmen by a speech. The latter had been assembled to the number of two thousand at a patriotic dinner. I received a very obliging and pressing invitation to attend, and I did. When I arrived, the procession was ready to start for the banqueting-hall, with, at its head, my old colleague Havin, who had come expressly from Saint-Lo to take the chair. It was the first time I had met him since the 24th of February. On that day, I saw him giving his arm to the Duchesse d'Orleans, and the next morning I heard that he was Commissary of the Republic in the department of la Manche. I was not surprised, for I knew him as one of those easily bewildered, ambitious men who had found themselves fixed for ten years in opposition, after thinking at first that they were in it only for a little. How many of these men have I not seen around me, tortured with their own virtue, and despairing because they saw themselves spending the best part of their lives in criticizing the faults of others without ever in some measure realizing by experience what were their own, and finding nothing to feed upon but the sight of public corruption! Most of them had contracted during this long abstinence so great an appetite for places, honours and money that it was easy to predict that at the first opportunity they would throw themselves upon power with a sort of gluttony, without taking time to choose either the moment or the morsel. Havin was the very type of these men. The Provisional Government had given him as his associate, and even as his chief, another of my former colleagues in the Chamber of Deputies, M. Vieillard, who has since become famous as a particular friend of Prince Louis Napoleon's. Vieillard was entitled to serve the Republic, since he had been one of the seven or eight republican deputies under the Monarchy. Moreover, he was one of the Republicans who had passed through the salons of the Empire before attaining demagogism. In literature he was a bigoted classic; a Voltairean in religious belief; rather fatuous, very kind-hearted; an honest man, and even an intelligent; but a very fool in politics. Havin had made him his tool: whenever he wished to strike a