The great souls, the glories of the people, emigrated.  Thus there was seen this dismal sight—­France driven out from France.

But what the Present appears to lose, the Future gains, the hand which scatters is also the hand which sows.

The Representatives of the Left, surrounded, tracked, pursued, hunted down, wandered for several days from refuge to refuge.  Those who escaped found great difficulty in leaving Paris and France.  Madier de Montjan had very black and thick eyebrows, he shaved off half of them, cut his hair, and let his beard grow.  Yvan, Pelletier, Gindrier, and Doutre shaved off their moustaches and beards.  Versigny reached Brussels on the 14th with a passport in the name of Morin.  Schoelcher dressed himself up as a priest.  This costume became him admirably, and suited his austere countenance and grave voice.  A worthy priest helped him to disguise himself, and lent him his cassock and his band, made him shave off his whiskers a few days previously, so that he should not be betrayed by the white trace of his freshly-cut beard, gave him his own passport, and only left him at the railway station.[34]

De Flotte disguised himself as a servant, and in this manner succeeded in crossing the frontier at Mouscron.  From there he reached Ghent, and thence Brussels.

On the night of December 26th, I had returned to the little room, without a fire, which I occupied (No. 9) on the second story of the Hotel de la Porte-Verte; it was midnight; I had just gone to bed and was falling asleep, when a knock sounded at my door.  I awoke.  I always left the key outside.  “Come in,” I said.  A chambermaid entered with a light, and brought two men whom I did not know.  One was a lawyer, of Ghent, M. ——­; the other was De Flotte.  He took my two hands and pressed them tenderly.  “What,” I said to him, “is it you?”

At the Assembly De Flotte, with his prominent and thoughtful brow, his deep-set eyes, his close-shorn head, and his long beard, slightly turned back, looked like a creation of Sebastian del Piombo wandering out of his picture of the “Raising of Lazarus;” and I had before my eyes a short young man, thin and pallid, with spectacles.  But what he had not been able to change, and what I recognized immediately, was the great heart, the lofty mind, the energetic character, the dauntless courage; and if I did not recognize him by his features, I recognized him by the grasp of his hand.

Edgar Quinet was brought away on the 10th by a noble-hearted Wallachian woman, Princess Cantacuzene, who undertook to conduct him to the frontier, and who kept her word.  It was a troublesome task.  Quinet had a foreign passport in the name of Grubesko, he was to personate a Wallachian, and it was arranged that he should not know how to speak French, he who writes it as a master.  The journey was perilous.  They ask for passports along all the line, beginning at the terminus.  At Amiens they were particularly suspicious.