Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/369

 BETWEEN THE CZAR AND THE SULTAN. 327 was really, they say, a strong disapprove* of the chap. President's acts, and it was natural that he should XIV * he most unwilling to be put to death or otherwise ill-treated upon the theory that he was the cousin and therefore the accomplice of Louis, for of that theory he wholly and utterly denied the truth. Any man, however firm, might well resolve that, happen what might to him, he would struggle hard to avoid being executed by mistake ; and it seems unfair to cast blame on Prince Napoleon for trying to disconnect his personal destiny from that of the endangered men at the Elyse'e, whose counsels he had not shared. Still, the sense of being cast loose by the other Lonapartes, could not but be discouraging to Prince Louis, and to those who had thrown in their lot with him. Maupas, or Do Maupas, was a man of a fine, Bodily state large, robust frame, and with florid healthy looks ; ° but it sometimes happens that a spacious and strong-looking body of that sort is not so safe a tabernacle as it seems for man's troubled spirit. It is said that the bodily strength of Maupas collapsed in the hour of danger, and that, at a critical part of the time between the night of the 2d of December and the massacre of the 4th, he had the misfortune to fall ill. but the writer evidently did not know that the insurrection at that time was so near its end as it really was, and his letter may therefore be taken as a fair indication of the state of his mind in the earlier part of the day. The advice and the mild remonstrance contained in the letter might have been given in private by a man who had not lost his calm, but the fact of allowing such a letter to be public discloses Jerome's motives.