She smiled and pressed my hand as she turned into her own porte-cochere.  Frightened servants and their friends were in the porter’s lodge, who gazed after her with exclamations as she went up the common stair.

The remainder of that day passed with very little fighting.  Up to that time it had been a riot apropos of a change of ministry, but in the night the secret societies met and flung aside the previous question.

When we awoke on Wednesday morning, February 23d, we were struck by the strange quiet of the streets.  No provisions entered Paris through the barrier, no vehicles nor venders of small wares.  The absolute silence, save when “Mourir pour la Patrie” sounded hoarsely in the distance, was as strange as it was unexpected.  I had always connected an insurrection with noise.  It was rumored that Guizot the Unpopular had been dismissed, and that Count Mole, a man of half measures, had been called to the king’s councils.  The affair looked to me as if it were going to die out for want of fuel.  But I was mistaken:  the blouses, who had not had one gun to a hundred the day before, had been all night arming themselves by domiciliary requisitions.  The national guard was not believed to be firm.

The night before, an hour after I had parted with Miss Hermione, I had made an attempt to see her and Mrs. Leare, without any success.  Not even bribery would induce the concierge to let me in.  His orders were peremptory:  “Pas un seul, monsieur, personne”—­madame received nobody.

Early on Wednesday morning I again presented myself:  the ladies were not visible.  Later in the day I called again, and was again refused.  But several times Amy had seen Hermione at a window, and they had made signs across the street to one another.  I began to understand that Mrs. Leare was overwhelmed by the responsibility she had incurred in opening her salon to men whom she now perceived to have been conspirators, and that she was obstinately determined not to compromise herself further by giving admittance to any one.

Our bonne had been able to ascertain from the concierge of the Leare house that madame was hysterical, and could hardly be controlled by mademoiselle.

I was in the streets till five o’clock on Wednesday, when, concluding all was over, I came home, intending to make another effort to see the Leares, and if possible to take Miss Hermione, with Ellen and Laetitia, to view the debris of the two days’ fight—­to let them get their first glimpse of real war in the Place de la Concorde, where a regiment was littering down its horses for the night, and a peep into the closed gardens of the Tuileries.

When I got up to our rooms I found my sisters at a window overlooking the courtyard of Mrs. Leare’s hotel, and they all cried out with one voice, “Mrs. Leare’s carriage is just ready to drive away.”

I looked.  A travelling-equipage stood in the courtyard.  On it the concierge was hoisting trunks, and into it was being heaped a promiscuous variety of knick-knackery and wearing apparel.  A country postilion—­who, but for his dirt, would have looked more like a character in a comedy than a real live, serviceable post-boy—­was standing in carpet slippers (having divested himself of his boots of office) harnessing three undersized gray Normandy mares to an elegant travelling-carriage.