in the head.  On receiving this information, I left the hotel and proceeded towards the river.  In the Rue du Bac, the great thoroughfare of the faubourg, I found a few men, and most of the women, at their shop-doors, and portes-cocheres, but no one could say what was going on in the more distant quarters of the town.  There were a few people on the quays and bridges, and, here and there, a solitary National Guard was going to his place of rendezvous.  I walked rapidly through the garden, which, at that hour, was nearly empty, as a matter of course, and passing under the arch of the palace, crossed the court and the Carrousel to la Rue de Richelieu.  A profound calm reigned in and about the chateau; the sentinels and loungers of the Guards seeming as tranquil as usual.  There was no appearance of any coming and going with intelligence, and I inferred that the royal family was either at St. Cloud, or at Neuilly.  Very few people were in the Place, or in the streets; but those who were, paused occasionally, looking about them with curiosity, and almost uniformly in a bewildered and inquiring manner.

I had reached the colonnade of the Theatre Francais, when a strong party of gendarmes a cheval went scouring up the street, at a full gallop.  Their passage was so swift and sudden, that I cannot say in which direction they came, or whither they went, with the exception that they took the road to the Boulevards.  A gendarme a pied was the only person near me, and I asked him, if he could explain the reason of the movement. “Je n’en sais rien,” in the brusque manner that the French soldiers are a little apt to assume, when it suits their humours, was all the reply I got.

I walked leisurely into the galleries of the Palais Royal, which I had never before seen so empty.  There was but a single individual in the garden, and he was crossing it swiftly, in the direction of the theatre.  A head was, now and then, thrust out of a shop-door, but I never before witnessed such a calm in this place, which is usually alive with people.  Passing part of the way through one of the glazed galleries, I was started by a general clatter that sprung up all around me in every direction, and which extended itself entirely around the whole of the long galleries.  The interruption to the previous profound quiet, was as sudden as the report of a gun, and it became general, as it were, in an instant.  I can liken the effect, after allowing for the difference in the noises, to that of letting fly sheets, tacks, and halyards, on board a vessel of war, in a squall, and to a sudden call to shorten sail.  The place was immediately filled with men, women, and children, and the clatter proceeded from the window-shutters that were going up all over the vast edifice, at the same moment.  In less than five minutes there was not a shop-window exposed.