in and fed, and given caps and blouses instead of their uniforms, and put across to the other side of the Seine in boats.  And with all that, so full is the heart of man, and yet more that of the child, of contradiction, that we followed the current and made tricolour cockades, my sisters and I, and all of us!  There is no doubt the fascination of the tricolour flag had a good deal to do with the rapidity with which the Revolutionary powder-train took fire.

As there must always be a laughable side, even to the grimmest events, the comic element was supplied in this case by our professors of languages, drawing, and so forth, who had not dared to go back into Paris after leaving it on the 28th, on account of the fighting.  When they had made up their minds to return on the 29th, we persuaded those of them who wore moustaches that they would run very great risks, and even be taken for soldiers in disguise.  Whereupon the schoolroom was at once turned into a barber’s shop, where a general shaving was performed, with the inevitable change of appearance resulting there-from, which increased the alarm of the individuals operated upon tenfold.

While our professors were shaving off their moustaches, our father was disappearing from Neuilly.  His movements were rigorously concealed from us, and I never learnt what they really were even in later days.  So I will not attempt to speak of them.  We were soon aware of the bare fact that he was in Paris, exercising public functions which were somewhat ill-defined as yet; and on the evening of the 31st my mother informed us that we were going to join him at the Palais-Royal. [Footnote:  It is not for me to pass judgment on my father’s conduct in accepting the crown in 1830.  There is no doubt the July Revolution was a great misfortune.  It gave a fresh blow to the monarchical principle, and it unfortunately encouraged those who speculate in insurrection.  But I know as a fact that my father never desired it, and indeed watched its approach with the deepest sorrow.  When the throne of Charles X. collapsed without his being able to defend it in any way, he certainly felt the most passionate desire to escape the common exile and to continue living a life which was to him the happiest of lives in France.  The struggle one over, and the country in revolt from end to end, he realized that the only way in which he could escape exile was to associate himself with the movement, and at the outset he certainly did it solely in the hope of bringing back Henri V. to the throne.  When this hope failed him, he yielded to the entreaties of those persons who implored him as the only person in a position to do it, to check France on that fateful descent which must bring her from the Republic to a Dictatorship, and so on to invasion, and to mutilation.  He delayed that disastrous succession of events for eighteen years, at the risk of his own life, which was incessantly threatened. and history will do him honour for it in spite of the injustice of human nature.]