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At this moment of the fall, irreparable for the cowards, the Right was
worthy, the Left was great.
Never before has History seen a Parliament fall in this manner.
February had blown upon the Deputies of the legal country, and the
Deputies had vanished. M. Sauzet had sunk down behind the tribune, and
had gone away without even taking his hat.
Bonaparte, the other, the first, the true Bonaparte, had made the "Five
Hundred" step out of the windows of the Orangery of Saint Cloud,
somewhat embarrassed with their large mantles.
Cromwell, the oldest of the Bonapartes, when he achieved his Eighteenth
Brumaire, encountered scarcely any other resistance than a few
imprecations from Milton and from Ludlaw, and was able to say in his
boorishly gigantic language, "I have put the King in my knapsack and the
Parliament in my pocket."
We must go back to the Roman Senate in order to find true Curule chairs.
The Legislative Assembly, let us repeat, to its honor, did not lose
countenance when facing the abyss. History will keep an account of it.
After having betrayed so many things, it might have been feared that
this Assembly would end by betraying itself. It did nothing of the kind.
The Legislature, one is obliged to remember, had committed faults upon
faults; the Royalist majority had, in the most odious manner, persecuted
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