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It was in this manner that Louis Bonaparte made his entry into the
Unexpected. This revealed him.
Certain brains are abysses. Manifestly for a long time past Bonaparte
had harbored the design of assassinating in order to reign.
Premeditation haunts criminals, and it is in this manner that treason
begins. The crime is a long time present in them, but shapeless and
shadowy, they are scarcely conscious of it; souls only blacken
gradually. Such abominable deeds are not invented in a moment; they do
not attain perfection at once and at a single bound; they increase and
ripen, shapeless and indecisive, and the centre of the ideas in which
they exist keeps them living, ready for the appointed day, and vaguely
terrible. This design, the massacre for a throne, we feel sure, existed
for a long time in Louis Bonaparte's mind. It was classed among the
possible events of this soul. It darted hither and thither like a
larva in an aquarium, mingled with shadows, with doubts, with desires,
with expedients, with dreams of one knows not what Caesarian socialism,
like a Hydra dimly visible in a transparency of chaos. Hardly was he
aware that he was fostering this hideous idea. When he needed it, he
found it, armed and ready to serve him. His unfathomable brain had
darkly nourished it. Abysses are the nurseries of monsters.
Up to this formidable day of the 4th December, Louis Bonaparte did not
perhaps quite know himself. Those who studied this curious Imperial
animal did not believe him capable of such pure and simple ferocity.
They saw in him an indescribable mongrel, applying the talents of a
swindler to the dreams of an Empire, who, even when crowned, would be a
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