plicate the confusion and increase the disaster. But neither in the case of Paris in 1830, nor of London in 1780, nor Bristol in 1831, was there any need of the officious interference of the loyal citizens there was, in all these cases, a sufficient public force, if it had been directed by men of common sense and firmness, to have restored order in the first instance. It was only the supine ness, the cowardice, or the treachery, of those who had the direction of the police and the troops that in all these instances were the true causes of the disasters.

On quitting M. Hennequin, M. Mazas fell in with an Englishman, who, with our characteristic disposition of meddling in other people's business, was in a state of the most joyous excitement, and astonished the French by his enthusiastic encouragement of the revolt. The first shot in this fatal contest was fired by an Englishman who lodged in the Rue St. Honoré, and here, in a different part of the town, we find another of our countrymen foremost in the sedition. We notice this with regret and shame, as being, we fear, a national characteristic. M. Mazas mentions it on account of a more curious circumstance: this Englishman announced that the republic had been already proclaimed, with La Fayette as president,' he announced this as early as mid-day of Wednesday the 28th, when there had appeared no other indication of such extreme proceedings.

M. Mazas, with a supererogation of loyalty, determined to proceed to St. Cloud; but he figured to himself the difficulty he should have in getting there, concluding that no doubt all the avenues of the royal residence would have been guarded, and that the bridges and other important posts between it and Paris would be occupied by the king's troops. No such thing: he sees two gendarmes on the bridge of Grenelle-an aide-de-camp of Marmont's, with a small escort, near Auteuil; and on the bridge of St. Cloud itself-which he had fancied he was to find strongly fortified an officer and a few men, who seemed to be rather on the look-out for news than occupying a post of importance. He reaches St. Cloud-he finds the centinels as usual, neither more nor less, and all the etiquettes of the palace in their usual sleepy train; except, indeed, that the court-yard always so full of equipages, and the corridors always so full of courtiers, were now quite deserted. He proceeds to look for his pupil and his governor, the Baron de Damas. They were in a part of the park called the Trocadero, where a kind of military playground had been formed for the young prince. He and his sister were playing with the children of M. and Madame de Damas, in their presence and that of a few other persons: the ladies and gentlemen were in great anxiety, but in utter ignorance of what was passing. At this moment

General

General Crossard arrived: he came, as M. Duhamel, a deputy, and his son had previously done, to offer his services-he gave a most alarming account of the state of Paris. Marmont,' he said, had committed an unpardonable blunder in concentrating his troops in the streets of Paris-the moment one finds resistance in a city, the only course is to get out of the streets, and not risk one's men in a war of crockery-ware and brickbats.' He offered, if they would lend him a uniform, to return to Paris, with orders to the marshal to evacuate the interior streets, and concentrate his army round the Tuileries-there to wait the reinforcements which would soon arrive from all quarters. At this moment the sentinel on the higher part of the ground cried out To arms!' as if the enemy were there. M. de Damas snatched up the young duke in his arms, like a feather, and conveyed him to the Château, leaving his wife and his own children to the care of Mazas. It was, however, a false alarm-the Parisians no more thought of attacking St. Cloud than the king or his officers thought of defending it. Night came on: Mazas offered to stay with M. de Damas, who gratefully accepted the offer, and immediately employed him in bringing up the ar rears of his correspondence, which had not been looked at for the last twenty-four hours. Indeed Mazas seems to have been-like the Duke of Bordeaux himself-a god-send, and he became a kind of factotum in this deserted court. But we are surprised to find that they could give this faithful and useful servant no better accommodation, after his anxieties and fatigues, than a common chair (un pliant), in which he slept a few hours, in a shooting-jacket, which he had worn as a kind of disguise to enable him to reach the Château.

In the morning of Thursday they saw by a telescope the tricoloured flag on Notre Dame. It afterwards disappeared, but was hoisted again about noon. All they knew in the king's palace of the state of Paris was what they could see with a telescope! M. de Damas now took the young prince to pay his daily visit to his grandfather, but he previously directed Mazas-whom he had employed in the early part of the morning in arranging and burning papers, and, in short, preparing for a retreat to proceed as far as he could towards Paris, for information of the state of affairs. Mazas undertook his new office with alacrity, and did not meet one soldier; but as he approached the barrier of Paris he found the insurgents were more alert than the troops, and had occupied all the passes: he had nothing to do but come back with the melancholy account that no troops were to be seen, and that the people of the villages were beginning to feel the infection of the city. He reached St.

Cloud,

Cloud, where he found the immediate guard of the palace not larger than usual; the soldiers were playing at ninepins, and within five hundred yards of them the tricoloured flag was flying in Sèvres. There was not even a gun to defend any approach of the château: there was a large depot of artillery at Vincennes, within a mile of Paris, but it never, it seems, had been thought of, till now-and now, as Vincennes was on the other side of Paris, it might as well have been at Moscow. But the youth of the military academy at St. Cyr, near Versailles, had a few small pieces for school practice: these boys-and this seems the only symptom of activity given in the whole affair-marched with their tiny guns to the defence of St. Cloud; and these little better than toy cannon, dragged by boys, were the only artillery that the King of France had to protect his house and person from insult in this crisis of his fate. The spirit of these glorious boys was wound up to a pitch of honour and devotion quite out of character with the pusillanimity and confusion which they found at St. Cloud; and they were actually locked up in one of the courts of the palace, to prevent their sallying out on the insurgents. 'I saw them,' says Mazas, hanging to the iron rails that confined them, and crying with the utmost enthusiasm Vive le Roi!'

Soon after appeared the Marquis de Dreux Brézé, who has since distinguished himself in the house of peers, and General Vincent. They remonstrated with M. de Damas that there were no measures of defence taken, that there was no one invested with any command or authority. General Vincent offered to go alone, to endeavour to quiet Versailles, which had now joined the revolt he went, and failed. Exposed to great personal danger, his courage and energy awed and at last propitiated the mob; they permitted him to return.

The news now became worse and worse. The Duke of Orleans was mentioned-with surprise that he had not come to place himself by the side of the king! It was openly said that his person should be secured; and an officer, whose name Mazas discreetly omits, was designated as the fit person for such an errand. But this was only a bravado of the ante-chamber-the king had neither the power nor the will, nor indeed any motive, to arrest the Duke of Orleans. His royal highness certainly had fears (as we shall show by and by from his own statement) for his personal liberty at this crisis, and hid hmself in a kind of gardenhouse in his park, but we really believe he was much more afraid of his friends, the mob, than of Charles X. Like Claudius, he was dragged from a hiding-place to the throne. Nor can we much blame him for having thus retreated from both parties: to have joined the king would have been to adopt his ministers

and

and their absurd and fatal measures. Whatever personal regard he might feel for the king, it would have argued a degree of magnanimity which few men possess, and least of all Louis Philippe, to have spontaneously allied himself to a cabinet who had proved that they had neither discretion and ability to avoid a conflict, nor foresight and firmness to prepare for one. M. Lafitte, the prime instigator, as it seems to us, of the whole sedition, and whose object was to have the Duke in his own sleeve, ready for any emergency, suggested to him suspicions of the intentions of the court, and by a witty enigma, worthy the days of oracular mythology, sent him word to beware the nets of St. Cloud.'*

About this time, however, a report was spread in the chateau that a deputation with offers of peace from the Parisians had arrived, and the inhabitants passed suddenly and inconsiderately to a state of confidence and comfort; they looked on all as settled, and began, says M. Mazas, to gossip as usual. Then it was that a storm of reproaches against M. de Polignac was heard on all sides. 'I was petrified,' says the good-natured tutor. He adds, All who had seen the court for these three days must have been disgusted with it for ever.' We believe it. Imbecility in the great, and ingratitude in their followers, are indeed disgusting. But while we concur in the general sentiment, we do not know that we should have applied it on this particular occasion. Surely the most honest-the most loyal-the most devoted-the most disinterested, might, without any reproach upon either his honour or his sagacity, have censured the policy, at once so rash and so timid-so daring and so weak, by which M. de Polignac had brought his sovereign and his country into such a crisis. Even the most ardent royalists, who might have approved the Ordonnances as right in themselves—or the most sagacious statesman who might have seen that they were the inevitable result of the necessities of the times, might and must have cursed the fatal temerity and insouciance which had neglected to provide for their execution and

success.

During this short fool's paradise Mazas happened to enter the apartment of General Trogof, 'one of the few men,' he says, 'who in all these difficult trials know how to preserve the manners and countenance which were suitable to his character and the occasion— calm and firm, but without bombast, and, above all, without com

To understand this, the reader must know that St. Cloud is lower down the stream of the Seine than Paris, and that nets are stretched there across the river to intercept any evidences of robbery or murder which the perpetrators of such crimes in Paris might throw into the river. Hence the phrase les filets de St. Cloud-so significantly used on this occasion.-We find, as this sheet is passing through the press, the hero of the last translated of De Koch's novels (those inimitable pictures of the Cockney life of Paris) ending his career among the nets of St. Cloud.See Andrew the Savoyard, vol. ii. p. 325.

plaints

plaints or recrimination.' He observed in a corner of the general's room a pile of a very strange and curious libel, which had been lately published against the Duke of Orleans, called Maria Stella. 'What in the world,' says Mazas, brings such a quantity of this libel into your room?' The king,' answered Trogof, 'having heard that such a work was in circulation, had commanded me to look after and seize all that I could find-he would not suffer such an outrage on the Duke of Orleans to circulate in his palace.' 'I have often recollected this,' says Mazas, when, since the 30th of July, I have seen the most infamous and atrocious libels against Charles X. and his immediate family ostentatiously exhibited in the Palais Royal; and I have thought of the pain that Louis Philippe must have felt at not being able to be as generous towards Charles, as Charles, up to the last moment, had been to him.'

The guards were now in full retreat; Mazas saw them pass the bridge of St. Cloud; the men were worn down with fatigue and exhaustion, but they maintained a soldier-like air, proud, and somewhat passionate. The 15th light infantry was peculiarly striking from the inflammation visible on the countenance of the men. It had done its duty during the earlier part of the contest, but had latterly refused to act; and now, with a romantic mixture of devotion and disobedience, came to return into the king's own hands the colours which he had given them. Their colonel, M. de Perregaux, an old soldier, whose heroic figure set off the chivalrous part he was acting, carried the colour himself, at the head of the regiment, and ascended alone the great staircase to deliver the defeated and abandoned but unsullied standard, into the hands of the defeated and abandoned but not unhonoured sovereign. How much more picturesque and touching was this unexpected incident than the premeditated theatrical displays to which the Revolution has trained the French people and army! And it was felt accordingly.

The army came back, as M. Bermond had already informed us, extenuated with toil and inanition-for neither Marmont nor any one else have ever remembered that soldiers must eat-and, above all, drink—after fighting in close streets for the three hottest days ever known-and he tells us that the kitchens of chateaus were emptied to afford them a scanty and unsuitable refreshment; but M. Mazas illustrates it by a fact:-he was seated at the Duke of Bordeaux's table; some officers, black with dust and gunpowder, were invited to share the dinner, but some one said that there was at the foot of the Orangerie a company of grenadiers who were absolutely starving. The whole of the prince's dinner was immediately sent down to the soldiers; the royal boy himself helping to lift off the massive silver dishes; and when he and his guests

some