An ugly salacious humor curved his pasty cheeks and twitched at his nostrils as he went on:
“Suppose we send Dunoisse? Madame de Roux adores him, but there are occasions upon which she would find it more convenient to adore him from a distance. One can easily comprehend that!”
He added, as his merry men roared with laughter:
“It is decided, then. Colonel Dunoisse shall be our messenger. Pray touch the bell, M. de St. Arnaud.”
A moment later the band of the —th Hussars crashed magnificently into the opening bars of “Partant Pour La Syrie,” and Monseigneur, imperturbable and gracious as ever, was smiling on the “damnable rabble” crowding to bask in the rays of their midnight-risen sun. And beyond the big gilded gates of the little palace Paris buzzed and roared like an angry beehive into which some mischief-loving urchin has poked a stick.
XLIX
The egg of the coup d’État was hatched as the train that carried Monseigneur’s secret messenger rushed over the iron rails that sped it to the sea.
We know his programme, masterly in detail, devilish in its crushing, paralyzing, merciless completeness. The posting of notices at every street corner, in every public square, on every tree of the boulevards, proclaiming that crowds would thenceforth be dispersed by military force, Without Warning; the distribution of troops; the disposition of batteries; the arrests of the Representatives, the publication of the Decree dissolving the Assembly; the seizure of the Ministry of the Interior; the closure of the High Courts of Justice—a symbolical gagging and blinding of the Law. And Paris, rising early on that red December morning, turned out under the chilly skies to read her death-sentence, ignorant of its true nature; and to wonder at the military spectacle provided for her eyes.
For the five brigades of Carrelet’s Division, cavalry and infantry, extended in échelon from the Rue de la Paix to the Faubourg Poissonière. Each brigade with its artillery, numbering seventeen thousand Pretorians, give additional regiments, with a reserve of sixty thousand men, being held in readiness to use cannon, saber, pistol, and bayonet upon the bodies of their fellow-countrymen and women, that France might be saved, according to Monseigneur.
The First Regiment of Lancers, to their eternal dishonor, opened the ball. Amidst cries of “Long live the Republic!” “Down with Louis Bonaparte, traitor to the people!” they charged the crowd. Men, women, and children were ruthlessly cut down: and then, from the Gymnase Theater to the Bains Chinois, took place the Great Battue.