Note 94 — LXXXV.

Arnould is a man of about forty-seven years of age, small in stature, lively and intelligent. He has written in many of the Democratic journals of Paris and the provinces; and his literary talents are of a good kind. Being connected with Rochefort’s journal, the Marseillaise, he was sent by the latter to challenge Pierre Bonaparte, and was a witness at the trial which followed the murder of Victor Noir. Although naturally drawn by his connections into the movement of the eighteenth of March, he always protested loudly against the arbitrary acts of the Commune, and it is surprising that he did not fall under accusation, by his colleagues. He opposed particularly the proposals for the suppression of newspapers. “It is prodigious to me,” he said, in full meeting of the committee, “that people will still talk of arresting others for expressing their opinions.” He voted against the organisation of the Committee of Public Safety on the ground:— “That such an institution would be directly opposed to the political opinions of the electoral body, of which the Commune is the representative.” He protested most energetically against secret imprisonment— “Secret incarceration has something immoral in it; it is moral torture substituted for physical. “I cannot understand men who have passed their life in combating the errors of despotism, falling into the same faults when they arrive at power. Of two things one: either secret imprisonment is an indispensable and good thing; or, it is odious. If it was good it was wrong to oppose it, and if it be odious and immoral, we ought not to continue it.” What on earth had he then to do in the Commune? “Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?”