The worthy Heymes did my father a great service a short time after the review which has led me to mention him.  It was at the moment of the insurrection in June 1832.  We were at St. Cloud.  It was well known that the agitators of every description intended to make a demonstration on the occasion of General Lamarque’s funeral, but the demonstration was not expected to be of any importance.  However, at about five in the evening, we beheld Heymes, in plain clothes, gallop into the courtyard, on a dragoon’s charger, covered with foam.  He had just come from the demonstration, and had witnessed that ordinary prologue to revolutions, pillage and massacre—­pillage of gunsmiths’ shops, and massacre of the officers of the 6th Dragoons, shot down with pistols, without any provocation whatever, at the head of their squadrons in line.

“You must come to Paris, Sire,” he said, as he dismounted.  My father did not wait for him to say it twice, and an hour later he was at the Tuileries, thence giving the impulse which nipped the revolutionary attempt in the bud.  The next morning he was on horseback amidst the troops and the National Guard, which hemmed the rioters into the ward of St. Merri.  An incident occurred there which was highly characteristic of that Parisian population, in whom a generous chord will always thrill, even in its maddest moments.  The King, with my brother Nemours and his staff, had gone down the Rue des Arcis, at the end of which lively firing was heard.  The troops who were massed in the street greeted the sovereign with cheers, and he, going forward, reached a square in which the fighting was actually going on.  The cheering ran from one to another, the soldiers who were engaged ceasing their fire to join in.  This change in the music struck the insurgents also at last.  They stopped firing too, and were to be seen appearing at the windows, rifle in hand, taking off their caps to the plucky King, whom they would not have hesitated to shoot at a minute before.

I need not say that as soon as the King and his escort disappeared down a side street the fight began again, merrier than ever, and the 42nd Regiment of the line carried the monastery of St. Merri.  An historic regiment that 42nd!  After having fought against the “White” insurrection in the Vendee and the republican insurrection at the St. Merri monastery, caused the breakdown of Prince Napoleon’s Boulogne adventure, occupied the Chamber of Deputies on the 2nd of December, and heroically lost its whole strength twice over in the siege of Paris, it has had the good fortune of being almost the only one of our regiments to keep its arms and its colours amidst all our mishaps.

There was no further interruption to the course of my studies, except a journey of the King’s to Normandy, on which I accompanied him.  The official object of this journey was to hold a review, at Cherbourg, of the squadron which had operated, in concert with an English one, in the North Sea, during the arrangement of the Belgian question.  But its chief end was to go through the Departments in Normandy and enter into relations with the honest folk who populated them.