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"
"
"
You."
How so?"
Listen to me."
Then he set forth with that clearness, complicated at times with
paradoxes, which is one of the resources of his remarkable mind, the
situation, at the same time desperate and strong, in which we were
placed.
This situation, which moreover I realized as well as he himself, was
this:--
The Right of the Assembly was composed of about 400 members, and the Left
of about 180. The four hundred of the majority belonged by thirds to
three parties, the Legitimist party, the Orleanist party, the Bonapartist
party, and in a body to the Clerical party. The 180 of the minority
belonged to the Republic. The Right mistrusted the Left, and had taken a
precaution against the minority.
A Vigilance Committee, composed of sixteen members of the Right, charged
with impressing unity upon this trinity of parties, and charged with the
task of carefully watching the Left, such was this precaution. The Left
at first had confined itself to irony, and borrowing from me a word to
which people then attached, though wrongly, the idea of decrepitude, had
called the sixteen Commissioners the "Burgraves." The irony subsequently
turning into suspicion, the Left had on its side ended by creating a
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