others, but he posing before the citizens with the official phrases about “Order,” “Religion,” “Family,” “Property,” and, behind him, the secret society of skipjacks and picaroons, the society of disorder, of prostitution, and of theft,—that is Bonaparte himself as the original author; and the history of the “Society of December 10” is his own history. Now, then, it happened that Representatives belonging to the party of order occasionally got under the clubs of the Decembrists. Nay, more. Police Commissioner Yon, who had been assigned to the National Assembly, and was charged with the guardianship of its safety, reported to the Permanent Committee upon the testimony of one Alais, that a Section of the Decembrists had decided on the murder of General Changarnier and of Dupin, the President of the National Assembly, and had already settled upon the men to execute the decree. One can imagine the fright of Mr. Dupin. A parliamentary inquest over the “Society of December 10,” i. e., the profanation of the Bonapartist secret world now seemed inevitable. Just before the reconvening of the National Assembly, Bonaparte circumspectly dissolved his Society, of course, on paper only. As late as the end of 1851, Police Prefect Carlier vainly sought, in an exhaustive memorial, to move him to the real dissolution of the Decembrists.
The “Society of December 10” was to remain the private army of Bonaparte until he should have succeeded in converting the public Army into a “Society of December 10.” Bonaparte made the first attempt in this direction shortly after the adjournment of the National Assembly, and he did so with the money which he had just wrung from it. As a fatalist, he lives devoted to the conviction that there are certain Higher Powers, whom man, particularly the soldier, cannot resist. First