number for the present seance is complete. To business. Since we last
met, our cause has advanced with rapid and not with noiseless stride. I
need not tell you that Louis Bonaparte has virtually abnegated _Les idees
Napoleoniennes,--a fatal mistake for him, a glorious advance for us. The
liberty of the press must very shortly be achieved, and with it personal
government must end. When the autocrat once is compelled to go by the
advice of his ministers, look for sudden changes. His ministers will be
but weathercocks, turned hither and thither according as the wind chops
at Paris; and Paris is the temple of the winds. The new revolution is
almost at hand. [Murmurs of applause.] It would move the laughter of
the Tuileries and its ministers, of the Bourse and of its gamblers, of
every dainty salon of this silken city of would-be philosophers and wits,
if they were told that here within this mouldering baraque, eight men, so
little blessed by fortune, so little known to fame as ourselves, met to
concert the fall of an empire. The Government would not deem us
important enough to notice our existence."

"I know not that," interrupted the Pole.

"Ah, pardon," resumed the orator; "I should have confined my remark to
the five of us who are French. I did injustice to the illustrious
antecedents of our foreign allies. I know that you, Thaddeus Loubisky,
that you, Leonardo Raselli, have been too eminent for hands hostile to
tyrants not to be marked with a black cross in the books of the police; I
know that you, Jan Vanderstegen, if hitherto unscarred by those wounds in
defence of freedom which despots and cowards would fain miscall the
brands of the felon, still owe it to your special fraternity to keep your
movements rigidly concealed. The tyrant would suppress the International
Society, and forbids it the liberty of congress. To you three is granted
the secret entrance to our council-hall. But we Frenchmen are as yet