“A passport from without would do equally well,” he announced.  “Listen, now, and trust to me.  I will go back to Meudon at once.  My father shall give me two permits — one for myself alone, and another for three persons — from Meudon to Paris and back to Meudon.  I reenter Paris with my own permit, which I then proceed to destroy, and we leave together, we three, on the strength of the other one, representing ourselves as having come from Meudon in the course of the day.  It is quite simple, after all.  If I go at once, I shall be back to-night.”

“But how will you leave?” asked Aline.

“I?  Pooh!  As to that, have no anxiety.  My father is Mayor of Meudon.  There are plenty who know him.  I will go to the Hotel de Ville, and tell them what is, after all, true — that I am caught in Paris by the closing of the barriers, and that my father is expecting me home this evening.  They will pass me through.  It is quite simple.”

His confidence uplifted them again.  The thing seemed as easy as he represented it.

“Then let your passport be for four, my friend,” madame begged him.  “There is Jacques,” she explained, indicating the footman who had just assisted them to alight.

Rougane departed confident of soon returning, leaving them to await him with the same confidence.  But the hours succeeded one another, the night closed in, bedtime came, and still there was no sign of his return.

They waited until midnight, each pretending for the other’s sake to a confidence fully sustained, each invaded by vague premonitions of evil, yet beguiling the time by playing tric-trac in the great salon, as if they had not a single anxious thought between them.

At last on the stroke of midnight, madame sighed and rose.

“It will be for to-morrow morning,” she said, not believing it.

“Of course,” Aline agreed.  “It would really have been impossible for him to have returned to-night.  And it will be much better to travel to-morrow.  The journey at so late an hour would tire you so much, dear madame.”

Thus they made pretence.

Early in the morning they were awakened by a din of bells — the tocsins of the sections ringing the alarm.  To their startled ears came later the rolling of drums, and at one time they heard the sounds of a multitude on the march.  Paris was rising.  Later still came the rattle of small-arms in the distance and the deeper boom of cannon.  Battle was joined between the men of the sections and the men of the Court.  The people in arms had attacked the Tuileries.  Wildest rumours flew in all directions, and some of them found their way through the servants to the Hotel Plougastel, of that terrible fight for the palace which was to end in the purposeless massacre of all those whom the invertebrate monarch abandoned there, whilst placing himself and his family under the protection of the Assembly.  Purposeless to the end, ever adopting the course pointed out to him by evil counsellors, he prepared for resistance only until the need for resistance really arose, whereupon he ordered a surrender which left those who had stood by him to the last at the mercy of a frenzied mob.