Arnauld (de l’Ariege) gave me his arm.  The two Italian exiles, Carini aril Montanelli, accompanied me.

Montanelli took my hands and said to me, “Right will conquer.  You will conquer.  Oh! that this time France may not be selfish as in 1848, and that she may deliver Italy.”  I answered him, “She will deliver Europe.”

Those were our illusions at that moment, but this, however, does not prevent them from being our hopes to-day.  Faith is thus constituted; shadows demonstrate to it the light.

There is a cabstand before the front gate of St. Paul.  We went there.  The Rue St. Antoine was alive with that indescribable uneasy swarming which precedes those strange battles of ideas against deeds which are called Revolutions.  I seemed to catch, in this great working-class district, a glimpse of a gleam of light which, alas, died out speedily.  The cabstand before St. Paul was deserted.  The drivers had foreseen the possibility of barricades, and had fled.

Three miles separated Arnauld and myself from our houses.  It was impossible to walk there through the middle of Paris, without being recognized at each step.  Two passers-by extricated us from our difficulty.  One of them said to the other, “The omnibuses are still running on the Boulevards.”

We profited by this information, and went to look for a Bastille omnibus.  All four of us got in.

I entertained at heart, I repeat, wrongly or rightly, a bitter reproach for the opportunity lost during the morning.  I said to myself that on critical days such moments come, but do not return.  There are two theories of Revolution:  to arouse the people, or to let them come of themselves.  The first theory was mine, but, through force of discipline, I had obeyed the second.  I reproached myself with this.  I said to myself, “The People offered themselves, and we did not accept them.  It is for us now not to offer ourselves, but to do more, to give ourselves.”

Meanwhile the omnibus had started.  It was full.  I had taken my place at the bottom on the left; Arnauld (de l’Ariege) sat next to me, Carini opposite, Montanelli next to Arnauld.  We did not speak; Arnauld and myself silently exchanged that pressure of hands which is a means of exchanging thoughts.

As the omnibus proceeded towards the centre of Paris the crowd became denser on the Boulevard.  As the omnibus entered into the cutting of the Porte St. Martin a regiment of heavy cavalry arrived in the opposite direction.  In a few seconds this regiment passed by the side of us.  They were cuirassiers.  They filed by at a sharp trot and with drawn swords.  The people leaned over from the height of the pavements to see them pass.  Not a single cry.  On the one side the people dejected, on the other the soldiers triumphant.  All this stirred me.

Suddenly the regiment halted.  I do not know what obstruction momentarily impeded its advance in this narrow cutting of the Boulevard in which we were hemmed in.  By its halt it stopped the omnibus.  There were the soldiers.  We had them under our eyes, before us, at two paces distance, their horses touching the horses of our vehicle, these Frenchmen who had become Mamelukes, these citizen soldiers of the Great Republic transformed into supporters of the degraded Empire.  From the place where I sat I almost touched them; I could no longer restrain myself.