and comes uppermost when self-control is lost, the nature of many an
honest workman, humane and tender-hearted as the best of us, commenced a
change into the wild beast that raged through the civil war of the
Communists, on the day when half-a-dozen Incapables, with no more claim
to represent the people of Paris than half-a-dozen monkeys would have,
were allowed to elect themselves to supreme power, and in the very fact
of that election released all the elements of passion, and destroyed all
the bulwarks of order.




CHAPTER X.

No man perhaps had more earnestly sought and more passionately striven
for the fall of the Empire than Victor de Mauleon; and perhaps no man was
more dissatisfied and disappointed by the immediate consequences of that
fall, In first conspiring against the Empire, he had naturally enough,
in common with all the more intelligent enemies of the dynasty, presumed
that its fate would be worked out by the normal effect of civil causes--
the alienation of the educated classes, the discontent of the artisans,
the eloquence of the press and of popular meetings, strengthened in
proportion as the Emperor had been compelled to relax the former checks
upon the license of either. And De Mauleon had no less naturally
concluded that there would be time given for the preparation of a
legitimate and rational form of government to succeed that which was
destroyed. For, as has been hinted or implied, this remarkable man was
not merely an instigator of revolution through the Secret Council, and
the turbulent agencies set in movement through the lower strata of
society;--he was also in confidential communication with men eminent for