Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/293

 BETWEEN THE CZAR AND THE SULTAN. 251 captives, for no one of them was suffered to go chap out. For some time they were kept waiting. At '__ length Colonel Beville came from the Elyse'e with his packet of manuscripts. These papers were the proclamations required for the early morning, and M. St Georges, the Director, gave orders to put them into type. It is said that there was something like resistance ; but in the end, if not at first, the printers obeyed. Each compositor stood whilst he worked between two policemen, and the manuscript being cut into many pieces, no one could make out the sense of what he was printing.* By these proclamations the President TiiePm- asserted that the Assembly was a hotbed of plots ; there declared it dissolved ; pronounced for universal suffrage ; proposed a new constitution ; vowed anew that his duty was to maintain the Bepublic;i" and placed Paris and the twelve surrounding departments under martial law. J In one of the proclamations he appealed to the army, and strove to whet its enmity against civilians by reminding it of the defeats inflicted upon the troops in 1830 and 1848.§ The President wrote letters dismissing the mem- t 'My duty is to baffle their perfidious projects, to maintain ' the Republic, and to save the country,' &c. ' Annuaire,' App. p. 60.— Note to 4lh Edition, 1863. £ Ibid. § The proclamation to the army contained this passage : ' In ' 1830, as in 1848, they treated you as conquered men. After ' having spurned your heroic disinterestedness, they disdained ' to consult your sympathies and your wishes, and yet you are ' the elite of the nation. To-day, in this solemn moment, I ' desire that the army may make its voice heard.' — Granier de
 * Mauduit, 'Revolution Militaire,' p. 92.