During a check we had met the King, who had got out of his carriage at the cross roads at the Monts de Fays and was amusing himself in a somewhat Yankee fashion of his by whittling small sticks with his penknife.

“The quarry is over there, away in the country,” he said with the chaffing air he always took on when there was any question of hunting, which he detested.  He had a way, when the sport was mentioned before him, of defining it thus: 

“A nice sort of amusement, indeed!  I used to hunt once upon a time, to please my father!  You get fifty horsemen together.  Everybody is got up in the smartest style.  First of all there is a general kicking of horses all round.  All at once somebody shouts ‘Found!’ and in one minute every soul is covered with mud from head to foot.  You tear along as hard as your horse can go for two hours without seeing a single thing.  Then there is another whoop, and every soul goes home completely knocked up—­ a very fine amusement indeed!”

We left the King to his little sticks, we killed our boar, and we were on our way home, when, as we were going down the hill from Franchard, a Hussar officer came galloping up to us, and called out: 

“The King has been fired at.  He’s not hit.”

If Providence ever watched over a man it did so that day.  The would-be assassin, Lecomte, a royal forester who had resigned his place, angry because he had not been given the capital sum producing his pension, instead of the pension itself, of which he was in receipt, and overexcited as well by the calumny, abuse, attacks, and threats of all kinds with which the daily press overwhelmed the King, had determined to kill his Majesty.

He was an excellent shot, and he went and built himself a platform behind the wall of the Parquet d’Avon, by which he knew the King’s char a banes must pass.  When the carriage went by, at a slow trot, ten paces from his ambush, he rested his rifle on the wall, and fired.  But at the very instant of the crime his hand must have trembled, for nobody was touched, neither the orderly officer on duty, Captain Brahaut, who was riding between the King and the wall, nor Montalivet, who was sitting talking to my father, on the front seat of the carriage, nor my mother, the Duchesse de Nemours, my aunt Adelaide, and the Prince and Princess of Salerno, who were on the other seats.  All the bullet did was to cut the fringe of a sort of awning, which covered the carriage, just above the King’s head.

At the sound of the shot, the intended effect of which nobody mistook, the two orderly officers, Brahaut and de Labadie, followed by Colonel Berryer, and several Hussar officers who were in attendance on the royal party, dashed off at a gallop to surround the enclosure, before Lecomte could escape from it.  At the same moment, one of the grooms named Millet, who had brought his horse up against the wall, and stood up on his saddle, saw the assassin making off.  He sprang boldly after him, and had a fearful struggle with him till the officers came up to his assistance.