He robs the Bank of France of
twenty-five million francs; buys General Magnan with one million and
the soldiers with fifteen francs and a drink to each; comes secretly
together with his accomplices like a thief by night; has the houses of
the most dangerous leaders in the parliament broken into; Cavalignac,
Lamorciere, Leflo, Changarnier, Charras, Thiers, Baze, etc., taken
out of their beds; the principal places of Paris, the building of the
parliament included, occupied with troops; and, early the next
morning, loud-sounding placards posted on all the walls proclaiming the
dissolution of the National Assembly and of the Council of State, the
restoration of universal suffrage, and the placing of the Department
of the Seine under the state of siege. In the same way he shortly
after sneaked into the "Moniateur" a false document, according to which
influential parliamentary names had grouped themselves round him in a
Committee of the Nation.
Amidst cries of "Long live the Republic!", the rump-parliament,
assembled at the Mayor's building of the Tenth Arrondissement, and
composed mainly of Legitimists and Orleanists, resolves to depose
Bonaparte; it harangues in vain the gaping mass gathered before the
building, and is finally dragged first, under the escort of African
sharpshooters, to the barracks of Orsay, and then bundled into convicts'
wagons and transported to the prisons of Mazas, Ham and Vincennes.
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