ourselves put into thirty-five days of quarantine.  Five and thirty days of prison and solitude and uselessness imposed on a crew without a single sick man, which was daily inspected by its officers as to cleanliness, whose health was looked after by three doctors, and which had just gone through the best and safest of purifying operations—­a long sea voyage.  Five and thirty days during which 400 men ate and drank and lived at the expense of the National Budget without doing the smallest work for the country—­the whole thing inflicted by the Sanitary Board—­a purely local and irresponsible body, with its eternal round of red tape.  A good thing it is indeed that such a monstrous and intolerable abuse should have been abolished!  The only reason it lasted so long is, that it brought in a revenue to the members of the board.  To begin with, they filled the inn they kept under the title of “Lazaretto” by force, and then they sold the disinfectants.  “Gentlemen,” the sanitary officer would say, with his provencal accent—­“Nous allons faire le parfum.”  The crew were shut up below, the officer lighted a sort of pastille which made a great smoke, everybody pretended to sneeze at once ... and we were disinfected!  The farce was over!  There was a great dinner too, which the board gave itself at Saint Roch, at the expense of the persons in quarantine, which put the finishing touch to the scandal.  Wherefore, during my own detention, I always had the band on deck as soon as the boat belonging to the board appeared in the port, and greeted it with the most horrible and discordant of music.  Further, I asked guilelessly for leave to carry on my ship’s firing drill in the Lazaretto Bay, and I took care to open fire so close to the Lazaretto itself that I heard all the glass in the windows fall out with a crash.  As I expected, I was forbidden to do it again, the board being furious, and having lodged a complaint, stating that I used bad cartridges, but I had a delicious moment of vengeance all the same.

The quarantine came to an end at last, I was given leave, and once more, with joy, beheld my family, and Paris too.  I had spent the greater part of my existence for the past four years at sea, and I confess I thirsted somewhat for Paris, dear unrivalled Paris!  I got there in the heart of the winter of 1839, and left it in the first days of June of the same year.  What recollections have I of those four months of repose?  In vain I tax my memory, I can find nothing, or hardly anything at all.  As far as exterior events go, none but the most infinitesimally small—­the eternal wearying struggle between ministers in esse and in posse, which left the bulk of the public exceedingly indifferent.  If the situation from the external point of view had grown more serious, at all events it did not inspire anxiety.  The strength of the monarchical principle still made itself felt, in spite of the hitch in 1830.  People reckoned on the King, on his wisdom and farsighted