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The meeting in the Tenth Arrondissement yielded to force. President Vitet
insisted that they should forcibly arrest him. A police agent who seized
him turned pale and trembled. In certain circumstances, to lay violent
hands upon a man is to lay them upon Right, and those who dare to do so
are made to tremble by outraged Law. The exodus from the Mairie was long
and beset with obstructions. Half-an-hour elapsed while the soldiers were
forming a line, and while the Commissaries of Police, all the time
appearing solely occupied with the care of driving back the crowd in the
street, sent for orders to the Ministry of the Interior. During that time
some of the Representatives, seated round a table in the great Hall,
wrote to their families, to their wives, to their friends. They snatched
up the last leaves of paper; the pens failed; M. de Luynes wrote to his
wife a letter in pencil. There were no wafers; they were forced to send
the letters unsealed; some soldiers offered to post them. M. Chambolle's
son, who had accompanied his father thus far, undertook to take the
letters addressed to Mesdames de Luynes, de Lasteyrie, and Duvergier de
Hauranne. General Forey--the same who had refused a battalion to the
President of the Constituent Assembly, Marrast, who had promoted him from
a colonel to a general--General Forey, in the centre of the courtyard of
the Mairie, his face inflamed, half drunk, coming out, they said, from
breakfast at the Elysée, superintended the outrage. A member, whose name
we regret we do not know, dipped his boot into the gutter and wiped it
along the gold stripe of the regimental trousers of General Forey.
Representative Lherbette came up to General Forey, and said to him,
"General, you are a coward." Then turning to his colleagues, he
exclaimed, "Do you hear? I tell this general that he is a coward."
General Forey did not stir. He kept the mud on his uniform and the
epithet on his cheek.
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