documents which had to be printed were distributed throughout the room,
being cut up in very small pieces, so that an entire sentence could not
be read by one workman. The manager announced that he would give them an
hour to compose the whole. The different fragments were finally brought
to Colonel Béville, who put them together and corrected the proof sheets.
The machining was conducted with the same precautions, each press being
between two soldiers. Notwithstanding all possible diligence the work
lasted two hours. The gendarmes watched over the workmen. Béville watched
over St. Georges.

When the work was finished a suspicious incident occurred, which greatly
resembled a treason within a treason. To a traitor a greater traitor.
This species of crime is subject to such accidents. Béville and St.
Georges, the two trusty confidants in whose hands lay the secret of the
_coup d'état_, that is to say the head of the President;--that secret,
which ought at no price to be allowed to transpire before the appointed
hour, under risk of causing everything to miscarry, took it into their
heads to confide it at once to two hundred men, in order "to test the
effect," as the ex-Colonel Béville said later on, rather naïvely. They
read the mysterious document which had just been printed to the Gendarmes
Mobiles, who were drawn up in the courtyard. These ex-municipal guards
applauded. If they had hooted, it might be asked what the two
experimentalists in the _coup d'état_ would have done. Perhaps M.
Bonaparte would have waked up from his dream at Vincennes.

The coachman was then liberated, the _fiacre_ was horsed, and at four
o'clock in the morning the orderly officer and the manager of the
National Printing Office, henceforward two criminals, arrived at the
Prefecture of Police with the parcels of the decrees. Then began for
them the brand of shame. Prefect Maupas took them by the hand.