for the months of September and October, and items like this will be found literally:
“Rumors of a ‘coup’ fill Paris. The capital, it is said, is to be filled with troops by night and the next morning decrees are to be issued dissolving the National Assembly, placing the Department of the Seine in state of siege restoring universal suffrage, and appealing to the people. Bonaparte is rumored to be looking for Ministers to execute these illegal decrees.”
The newspaper correspondence that brought this news always close ominously with “postponed.” The “coup” was ever the fixed idea of Bonaparte. With this idea he had stepped again upon French soil. It had such full possession of him that he was constantly betraying and blabbing it out. He was so weak that he was as constantly giving it up again. The shadow of the “coup” had become so familiar a spectre to the Parisians, that they refused to believe it when it finally did appear in flesh and blood. Consequently, it was neither the reticent backwardness of the chief of the “Society of December 10,” nor an unthought of surprise of the National Assembly that caused the success of the “coup.” When it succeeded, it did so despite his indiscretion and with its anticipation—a necessary, unavoidable result of the development that had preceded.