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Of Guizot he writes, "Tartuffe, gaunt, hollow, resting on the everlasting 'No' with a haggard consciousness that it ought to be the everlasting 'Yea." "To me an extremely detestable kind of man." Carlyle missed General Cavaignac, "of all Frenchmen the one" he "cared to see." In the streets of Paris he found no one who could properly be called a gentleman.
Fragments of manuscripts had been stolen, amongst others one dated July, 1848, and directed against the military dictatorship of Cavaignac, and in which there were verses written respecting the Censorship, the councils of war, and the suppression of the newspapers, and in particular respecting the imprisonment of a great journalist Emile de Girardin:
Lamoricière, impetuous and witty, throwing himself with all his military energy upon "the Bonaparte;" Cavaignac, calm and cold; Changarnier, silent and looking out through the port-hole at the landscape. The sergents de ville ventured to put in a word here and there.
Or he would wish that Cavaignac had been elected President at the September balloting; although he himself was then engraving one must live, after all a portrait of Prince Louis Napoleon, destined for the electoral platform. M. and Madame Violette let them talk; perhaps even they did not always pay attention to the conversation. When it was dark they held each other's hands and gazed at the stars.
There were fifteen thousand prisoners, of whom three thousand died of jail-fever. Thousands were sent to Cayenne; thousands to the galleys. This terrible four days' fight cost France more lives than any battle of the Empire. The insurrection being over, and Cavaignac dictator, the next thing was for the Assembly to make a constitution. This constitution was short-lived.
At exactly six that morning, Cavaignac, Changarnier, Lamoricière, Thiers, and all those who had lain down to sleep as cabinet ministers of the prince president, were roused from their beds by officers of cavalry, with orders to dress quickly, for they were under arrest. Before each door a hackney-coach was waiting, and an escort of two hundred Lancers was in a street near by.
The candidates are shaking their fists at each other. The Assembly hoots, growls, murmurs, stamps its feet, crushes one, applauds the other. This poor Assembly is a veritable fille a soldats, in love with a trooper. For the time being it is Cavaignac. Who will it be to-morrow? General Cavaignac proved himself to be clever, and occasionally even eloquent.
Cavaignac, who had saved Paris and France in the days of June Cavaignac, the competitor of Louis Napoleon at the last elections, shut up for a day and a night in the cell of a felon! I leave it to every honest man and every generous heart to comment on such facts. Such were the indignities offered to eminent men. Let me now review the series of general crimes.
Cavaignac, tall and supple, with his short frock-coat, his military collar, his heavy moustache, his bent brow, his brusque language, broken up by parentheses, and his rough gestures, was at times at once as fierce as a soldier and as passionate as a tribune.
"Generals?" cried out a fourth voice. "I am one of you!" The three generals recognized M. Baze. A burst of laughter came from the four cells simultaneously. This police-van in truth contained, and was carrying away from Paris, the Questor Baze, and the Generals Lamoricière, Cavaignac, and Changarnier.
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