One of Edward de Tocqueville's sons came in soon after; his brother, who is about seventeen, does duty as a private, has no servant, and cleans his own horse; and is delighted with his new life. That of our young cavalry officers is somewhat different. He did not hear of the _coup d'état_ till a week after it had happened.
'Our regiments,' said Lanjuinais, 'are a kind of convents. The young men who enter them are as dead to the world, as indifferent to the events which interest the society which they have left, as if they were monks. This is what makes them such fit tools for a despot.'
_Thursday, January 8, 1852_.--From Sir Henry Ellis's I went to Tocqueville's.
[3]'In this darkness,' he said, 'when no one dares to print, and few to speak, though we know generally that atrocious acts of tyranny are perpetrated everyday, it is difficult to ascertain precise facts, so I will give you one. A young man named Hypolite Magin, a gentleman by birth and education, the author of a tragedy eminently successful called "Spartacus," was arrested on the 2nd of December. His friends were told not to be alarmed, that no harm was intended to him, but rather a kindness; that as his liberal opinions were known, he was shut up to prevent his compromising himself by some rash expression. He was sent to Fort Bicêtre, where the casemates, miserable damp vaults, have been used as a prison, into which about 3,000 political prisoners have been crammed. His friends became uneasy, not only at the sufferings which he must undergo in five weeks of such an imprisonment in such weather as this, but lest his health should be permanently injured. At length they found that he was there no longer: and how do you suppose that his imprisonment has ended? He is at this instant at sea in a convict ship on his way to Cayenne--untried, indeed unaccused--to die of fever, if he escape the horrors of the passage. Who can say how many similar cases there may be in this wholesale transportation? How many of those who are missing and are supposed to have died at the barricades, or on the Boulevards, may be among the transports, reserved for a more lingering death!'
A proclamation to-day from the Prefect de Police orders all persons to erase from their houses the words 'Liberté,' 'Êgalité,' and 'Fraternité' on pain of being proceeded against _administrativement_.