Bad news, which the leaders had managed to conceal the previous evening, had spread abroad, though nobody in particular was known to have spoken.

It was the work of that invisible voice, which, with a word, throws a mob into a panic.
According to some reports Paris was subdued, and the provinces had offered their hands and feet, eager to be bound.

And it was added that a large party of troops, which had left Marseilles under the command of Colonel Masson and Monsieur de Bleriot, the prefect of the department, was advancing by forced marches to disperse the insurrectionary bands.
This news came like a thunderbolt, at once awakening rage and despair.
These men, who on the previous evening had been all aglow with patriotic fever, now shivered with cold, chilled to their hearts by the shameful submissiveness of prostrate France.

They alone, then, had had the courage to do their duty! And now they were to be left to perish amidst the general panic, the death-like silence of the country; they had become mere rebels, who would be hunted down like wild beasts; they, who had dreamed of a great war, of a whole nation in revolt, and of the glorious conquest of the people's rights! Miserably baffled and betrayed, this handful of men could but weep for their dead faith and their vanished dreams of justice.

There were some who, while taunting France with her cowardice, flung away their arms, and sat down by the roadside, declaring that they would there await the bullets of the troops, and show how Republicans could die.
Although these men had nothing now but death or exile before them, there were very few desertions from their ranks.