Prince, your patriotic instinct will enable you to resign yourself to this sacrifice, and to perform it unflinchingly.  Such is the confident hope of the Provisional Government.  Arago.

The signatory of this despatch had taught me in my youth, and I had kept up affectionate intercourse with him since.  But the coolness with which the man (a great savant, no doubt, but who up to this had never done anything but make calculations and handle telescopes) invested himself with supreme authority amazed me.  Exasperated as I was by his summons “to make no attempt to dissuade the sailors and soldiers of the navy from their obedience” to his hour-old government, in other words, from the violation of their oath which he was about to ask of all the brave fellows, I forgot both my former relations with the man and the courteous form of his despatch; and I was in a transport of rage as I handed the missive to Changarnier, commanding the troops, and M. Vaisse, the civil secretary-general, who were both of them present, in my brother’s study.

“That is a summons from the enemy,” I said; “we must do the very contrary.”

But M. Vai’sse was silent, and Changarnier shook his head.  I bethought me then, alas! that in this day of progress of ours the religion of a man’s oath is but an empty word—­and I recovered my self-possession.

My aide-de-camp, Commander Touchard, had come from Paris by the same corvette that had brought me the despatch.  He had seen the crash, had been present when the National Guard, upon whom my brother Nemours had called to resist the rioters, had overwhelmed him with abuse, had witnessed the abdication, the scenes in the Chamber, and the King’s final departure.  All the way across France, too, except at Toulon, where the strong hand of the navy made itself felt, Touchard had watched the eager speculations of the majority on the accomplished fact, and the struggle as to who should first offer his services to the Provisional Government, before the corpse of Constitutional Monarchy was cold—­for dead it was, without having struck a blow in its own defence.

There was no doubt about the King’s personal courage.  He had proved it on many battle-fields—­at Valmy, Jemmapes, and Nerwinde—­and under the frequent attempts made on him by would-be assassins.  With courage of a rarer kind, he had never hesitated to brave unpopularity, when his doing so was clearly to the country’s interest.  But he had striven, being honest as well as brave, to be faithful to the institutions he had sworn to maintain, although those who opposed him had long ceased to respect the fiction of the constitution, and had become a frankly revolutionist body, which no longer directed its attack against the ministry of the day, but against the King’s own person, and all that edifice on the summit of which the throne was placed.