being cut up in very small pieces, so that an entire sentence could not

be read by one workman. The manager announced that he would give them an

hour to compose the whole. The different fragments were finally brought

to Colonel Béville, who put them together and corrected the proof sheets.

The machining was conducted with the same precautions, each press being

between two soldiers. Notwithstanding all possible diligence the work

lasted two hours. The gendarmes watched over the workmen. Béville watched

over St. Georges.

When the work was finished a suspicious incident occurred, which greatly

resembled a treason within a treason. To a traitor a greater traitor.

This species of crime is subject to such accidents. Béville and St.

Georges, the two trusty confidants in whose hands lay the secret of the

coup d'état, that is to say the head of the President;--that secret,

which ought at no price to be allowed to transpire before the appointed

hour, under risk of causing everything to miscarry, took it into their

heads to confide it at once to two hundred men, in order "to test the

effect," as the ex-Colonel Béville said later on, rather naïvely. They

read the mysterious document which had just been printed to the Gendarmes

Mobiles, who were drawn up in the courtyard. These ex-municipal guards

applauded. If they had hooted, it might be asked what the two

experimentalists in the coup d'état would have done. Perhaps M.

Bonaparte would have waked up from his dream at Vincennes.

The coachman was then liberated, the fiacre was horsed, and at four

o'clock in the morning the orderly officer and the manager of the

National Printing Office, henceforward two criminals, arrived at the

Prefecture of Police with the parcels of the decrees. Then began for

The History of a Crime