When a man grown Louis Napoleon became a soldier of fortune. He fought against the pope; he tried to get up a revolution for his own benefit in the garrison at Strasburg; he entered France from the sea near Boulogne, again with no success; he was captured and imprisoned for six years, escaping in the clothes of a workman. It was only after the abdication of Louis Philippe that he dared to appear in Paris. While he was made a member of the Constituent Assembly, and was wire-pulling to secure his election to the presidency he was so poor that a street vender, a woman well-known because of her skill in getting about on two wooden legs, offered him money from her savings. When his star was in the ascendant he offered her an annuity. She refused it, saying that he wouldn’t take her money and so she wouldn’t take his. Béranger, the “people’s poet,” and Victor Hugo believed in Bonaparte and used their influence in his behalf. The election in 1848 put an end to Louis’ poverty but his appetite for power grew by what it fed on. The new constitution decreed that a president could not be a candidate for reëlection until four years had elapsed after his first term of office. This arrangement did not suit Louis’s ambition and in 1851 he followed the great Napoleon’s example in executing a _coup d’état_. It meant more barricades and more slaughter in the Paris streets, but it disposed of his enemies and left him free to secure yet another constitution which lengthened the president’s term to ten years. As with the great Napoleon, the people elected him emperor for life only a year later. He took the title of Napoleon III. The cholera ravaged France for many months during the early part of Louis Napoleon’s presidency. On one day there were six hundred and eighty deaths in Paris alone. Yet neither the epidemic nor republican simplicity prevented many elaborate public functions. In the autumn of 1848 the Palais Bourbon was the scene of many balls with a somewhat motley array of guests. It was currently reported in the city that before every ball there was such a washing and starching as never had been known before in the northern and eastern parts of the city, and that the tradesmen of those sections were accustomed to say with an air of pride, “No, we have nothing in ladies’ white kid gloves to-day except in small sizes--seven and under.”