France had not taken kindly to the notion of a plebiscite. The good city of Paris had had an indigestion of proclamations—was beginning to suspect the motives of her leading citizen. And the capital roared and buzzed like a beehive of angry bees.
He needed very much to be Dictator for ten years at least, the little man with the lank, drab hair, arrayed in the uniform of a General, adorned with the red cordon and the jeweled Grand Cross and Star of the Legion of Honor, who sat, upon this night of November, 1851, in a velvet armchair before the blazing wood-fire in his small private cabinet upon the ground-floor, with the tips of his spurred, wonderfully polished little boots upon the bar of a sumptuous, palatial fender of solid silver-gilt. Twelve millions of francs per annum for nearly four years had left him deep in debt and horribly embarrassed. When he should drive out of the courtyard of the Elysée at the expiration of his tenure of office, the gaping jaws of a debtor’s prison were ready to engulf him. He knew that very well.
And he waited, on the horns of a dilemma, with the son of his mother, who secretly detested him; and Fleury, now his senior aide-de-camp, and St. Arnaud, his War Minister, a lean, gaunt, dyed and painted personage who had once been an actor at a suburban theater, who had served in the Foreign Legion as a private soldier, who had seen much service, won promotion, and had now been recalled from Algeria by his friend. For the purpose of showing Parisians how warfare is conducted by civilized forces against Kabyles and Arabs and Moors.
Money, money!
As the neat white fingers of France’s First Citizen twisted comic figures out of paper, taken from a little inlaid table beside him where writing-materials were, his brain was busy with this vexing question of how to get more cash. Hundreds of millions of francs had been expended during his tenure of office. The china, pictures and other Art treasure of the Crown had been converted into bullion. The diamonds of the Crown and the Crown forests had become gold in the crucible of the auction-room. And—presto! the vast sums thus realized had vanished—nobody could exactly indicate how or whither—it was a puzzle to baffle Houdin. Nor could anyone point out the winners of the chief prizes advertized in the Lottery of the Golden Ingots, which had, with much tootling of official trumpets and banging of official drums, been drawn some days before.
Money!...
There was a reception upon this particular evening: the little Palace and its courtyard blazed with gas. A double line of carriages rolled ceaselessly in and out of high gilded gates, their twinkling lamps reflected in the cuirasses of the guard-of-honor. A steady stream of fire-worshipers, anxious to prostrate their foreheads in the dust before their god and luminary, rolled up the imposing flight of red-carpeted doorsteps and through the gilded vestibule to the small reception-rooms. Stars and Orders were not plentiful; Ambassadors were conspicuous by their absence: the Minister for the United States being the only exception to this rule. But lovely women were present; the whole galaxy of the Élysée scintillated in the heavens, and there were plenty of young attachés of Legation and clerks of the Diplomatic Corps. And silks and satins, feathers and diamonds, flaunted by gorgeous cocodettes of the fashionable world, mingled there with cotton-backed velvet, paste jewelry and cheap book-muslin; and gold-laced uniforms twinkling with decorations, jostled the black coat with the tricolor rosette, whose wearer had tramped in from Montrouge or Menilmontant to save a ’bus fare, and had stowed his overcoat and goloshes with the shawls and overshoes and umbrellas of his women-kind away behind the pedestal of some vestibule-bronze or group of statuary, to avoid the fee that must otherwise be paid to one of the large, stately footmen in the Presidential livery, in return for a wooden counter and the assumption of responsibility for these discarded coverings.
It was nearly midnight, and yet the sun had not risen; the magnificent band of the —th Hussars, stationed in the splendid gilt ballroom where the Prince-President had as a child witnessed the second abdication of the Emperor Napoleon, had not yet crashed into Partant Pour La Syrie. It had been given out that Monseigneur was delayed by the non-arrival of dispatches, detained by urgent affairs of State. Detectives, mingling with the throng of guests in the reception-rooms, kept their ears open for unfavorable comments: their eyes skinned for the possible interception of significant glances. Of which, had they but chosen to step outside the courtyard-gates, they might have gathered store.
For to be plain, Paris was in a state of ferment and disruption. Disaffection prevailed. Insurrection was rising to its old high-water mark. And the cries were: “Down with Bonaparte! Long live the Republic! Long live Law! Long live the Constitution! Down with the Army, the paid tool of the President who wants to be Emperor in spite of all his oaths!” And the ganglion of narrow streets that made the center of the city’s nervous system were being rapidly blocked by barricades built higher than before....