long, Paris was divided into two hostile camps,
burning to begin the work of mutual annihilation. On one side stood the
democratic republicans, who looked back with longing regret to the days
of terrorism and bloodshed, perceiving, as they did, that tranquillity
and protracted peace must soon wrest the reins of power from their
grasp, and therefore anxiously desiring to secure control through the
element of intimidation. This party declared that liberty was in danger,
and the Constitution threatened; they summoned the _sans-culottes_ and
the loud-mouthed republicans of the clubs to the armed defence of the
imperilled country, and pointed with menacing hands at Bonaparte as the
man who wished to overthrow the republic, and put France once more in
the bonds of servitude.

On the other side stood the discreet friends of the country, the
republicans by compulsion, who denounced terrorism, and had sworn
fidelity to the republic, only because it was under this reptile
disguise alone that they could escape the threatening knife of the
guillotine. On this side were arrayed the men of mind, the artists and
poets who hopefully longed for a new era, because they knew that the
days of terror and of the tyrannical democratic republic had brought not
merely human beings, but also the arts and sciences, to the scaffold.
With them, too, were arr