du Hallays was in its favor.  Louis Bonaparte said to the Marquis, “Fear nothing” (it is true that he whispered to the Marquise, “Make your mind easy").  The Assembly, after having shown here and there some symptoms of uneasiness, had grown calm.  There was General Neumayer, “who was to be depended upon,” and who from his position at Lyons would at need march upon Paris.  Changarnier exclaimed, “Representatives of the people, deliberate in peace.”  Even Louis Bonaparte himself had pronounced these famous words, “I should see an enemy of my country in any one who would change by force that which has been established by law,” and, moreover, the Army was “force,” and the Army possessed leaders, leaders who were beloved and victorious.  Lamoriciere, Changarnier, Cavaignac, Leflo, Bedeau, Charras; how could any one imagine the Army of Africa arresting the Generals of Africa?  On Friday, November 28, 1851, Louis Bonaparte said to Michel de Bourges, “If I wanted to do wrong, I could not.  Yesterday, Thursday, I invited to my table five Colonels of the garrison of Paris, and the whim seized me to question each one by himself.  All five declared to me that the Army would never lend itself to a coup de force, nor attack the inviolability of the Assembly.  You can tell your friends this.”—­“He smiled,” said Michel de Bourges, reassured, “and I also smiled.”  After this, Michel de Bourges declared in the Tribune, “this is the man for me.”  In that same month of November a satirical journal, charged with calumniating the President of the Republic, was sentenced to fine and imprisonment for a caricature depicting a shooting-gallery and Louis Bonaparte using the Constitution as a target.  Morigny, Minister of the Interior, declared in the Council before the President “that a Guardian of Public Power ought never to violate the law as otherwise he would be—­” “a dishonest man,” interposed the President.  All these words and all these facts were notorious.  The material and moral impossibility of the coup d’etat was manifest to all.  To outrage the National Assembly!  To arrest the Representatives!  What madness!  As we have seen, Charras, who had long remained on his guard, unloaded his pistols.  The feeling of security was complete and unanimous.  Nevertheless there were some of us in the Assembly who still retained a few doubts, and who occasionally shook our heads, but we were looked upon as fools.

[1] Colonel Charras was Under-Secretary of State in 1848, and Acting Secretary of War under the Provisional Government.

CHAPTER II.

PARIS SLEEPS—­THE BELL RINGS

On the 2d December, 1851, Representative Versigny, of the Haute-Saone, who resided at Paris, at No. 4, Rue Leonie, was asleep.  He slept soundly; he had been working till late at night.  Versigny was a young man of thirty-two, soft-featured and fair-complexioned, of a courageous spirit, and a mind tending towards social and economical studies.  He had passed the first hours of the night in the perusal of a book by Bastiat, in which he was making marginal notes, and, leaving the book open on the table, he had fallen asleep.  Suddenly he awoke with a start at the sound of a sharp ring at the bell.  He sprang up in surprise.  It was dawn.  It was about seven o’clock in the morning.