A young officer was killed beside him that day whose name was Hello.  His father, a friend of mine, had put him under my wing when he left the Naval College, and I had watched over his career with sincere affection for several years.  Every time I pass one of the commonplace statues placed in our public squares in memory of political chatterers who have died quietly in their beds, I think of all those brave fellows who have died obscurely for their country, with no funeral oration but the tears of their broken-hearted families, but who have carried away to their eternal dwelling-place the proud consolation of duty performed.

I returned to Paris.  What a state of things was there!  Politics had overwhelmed everything else.  To the lovers of order, who had already found their condition oppressive, the state of affairs was soon to become fatal.  The makers of sedition, on the other hand, found it most blessed.  But to the country at large, as events have too surely proved, it was disastrous.

I will not dwell too long on this sad period, my personal recollections of which are mingled with the events of a well-known page of our national history.

Towards the beginning of the winter of 1848 the doctors ordered my wife, who was in very delicate health, to go and spend the cold months in a southern climate, and I started with her and my children for Algiers, where I joined my brother Aumale, who had become governor-general of the colony.  I arrived, weighed down with gloomy forebodings, feeling convinced that by dint of trying to respect those so-called legal restraints which paralyse a government, but which do so little to hinder any revolutionary section in its action, we should end by being overwhelmed, and by hearing the fatal hour strike, the “too late” that comes with every revolution.  Yet I did not believe that hour so close at hand as it was.  For I had hardly settled down at Algiers, when one fine morning the announcement of the February revolution and the proclamation of the republic came upon us like the bursting of a shell.  The news arrived in the shape of vague rumours, uncertain information, reports of various kinds, brought over from Marseilles.  As to the amount of authenticity they possessed—­whether the movement was a general one or confined to Paris only, whether a stand was being made against it anywhere—­on all these points the earliest rumours were mute, and they were just as silent as to what had befallen the King and the rest of our family, in the confusion.  We were reduced to the wildest conjectures, and were wondering whether we ought not to start for France at once, when a steam corvette from Toulon brought me the following despatch:—­

The Minister for Naval Affairs to Monsieur le Prince de Joinville.

28th February, 1848, 8.30 p.m.

Prince,

The well-being of the country demands that you should make no attempt to dissuade the crews or soldiers of the navy from their obedience to the Provisional Government.  It is important that you should not attempt to set foot on French soil, nor communicate with any vessel in the French fleet, till further orders.