322 ORIGIN OF THE WAR OF 1853 CHAP, nervous organisation of the south with much of xry ' the energy of the north ; and they are keenly susceptible of the terror that makes a man kill people, and the terror that makes him lie down and beg. On that 4th of December, Paris was visited with terror in either form. The army raged and the people crouched ; but army and people alike were governed by terror. It is very true that in the Boulevard there were no physical dangers which could have struck the troops with this truculent sort of panic ; for even if it is believed that two or three shots were fired from a window or a house-top, an occurrence of that kind, in a quarter which was plainly prepared for skjht-seeiniT arid, not for strife, was too trivial of itself to be capable of disturbing prime troops. But the President and his associates, though they had succeeded in all their mechanical arrange- ments, had failed to obtain the support of men of character and eminence. For that reason they were obviously in peril ; and if Morny and Fleury still remained in good heart, there is no reason for doubting that on the 4th of December the sensations of the President, of the two other Bonapartes, of Maupas, of St Arnaud, and of Magnan, corresponded with the alarming circum- stances in which they were placed, state or The state of the President seems to have been Bonaparte very like what it had been in former times at period of° Strasburg and at Boulogne, and what it was years afterwards at Magenta and Solferino. He did not on any of these five occasions so give way
