bodies. You and the other officers of the
cortége, on your part, on the least movement
must draw close and cover his majesty."

Even that brave scarred old veteran, Marshal
Mortier, the Duke of Treviso, was nervous.
Mortier had been in the retreat from Russia,
and, indeed, in all the great battles of the
Revolution and the Empire, and, having passed
through rains of fire and hailstorms of bullets,
had forgotten what fear meant; but still the
rumours roused him. Although the old soldier's
health was so bad that only five months before
he had been obliged to surrender the presidency
of the council, he resisted all the prayers and
supplications of his family, and determined to
attend the anniversary review.

"Yes," he said, with the old fix-bayonet look
—- " yes, I shall go. I am a big man, perhaps
I shall cover the king."

There is no doubt that these alarms arose
from a consciousness of the feelings of the people.
You heard the rumours at the marble tables of
the cafés, and round the rough deal slabs in the
poorest wine-shops. In 1833, there had been
émeutes at Grenoble, Lyons, Châlons, Marseilles,
and at a dozen places. In 1834, two thousand
persons were seized or chased out of France,
one hundred and sixty-four political prisoners
tried, and four thousand witnesses examined.
The press dreaded more chains; justice was
interfered with. The prudence of the king in his
foreign relations the old Napoleon party
maliciously construed into neglect of the dignity
and glory of France. Tolerant and wise men
thought the king too indiscriminate in his efforts
to defend his power from revolutionists.
He swept into his lawyers' net every sort of
opponent. He treated his enemies as if they
had been God's enemies. There were fears that
Justice was not merely to wear the bandage,
but also to have her eyes put out. The press
was to be gagged and throttled off from truth;
there were rumours that the king was going to
raise a body-guard, and so defy the bourgeois
soldiers, who had burnt powder bravely for him
before Charles the Tenth turned his back on Paris.
There was no true liberty, then, after all the fighting
for it. King Stork had unseated King Log.

The July morning came; the sky was blue and
burning, the heat was striking fiercely on the
walls of the Tuileries, and the paving-stones of
the boulevards, and the leaves of the trees in the
Luxembourg gardens, were languid with the heat.
The quick sharp "tam-tam" of the drums of the
National Guard sounded everywhere in the
soldierly city, from the Place of the Bastille to
the Arc de l'Etoile. The measured tramp of
infantry was heard in the Rue St. Honoré and
round the Bourse; behind the Madelaine and
past the Louvre the lines of bayonets flashed
and glittered; everywhere there was marching.
The cavalry, too, were coming through the
barriers; children laughed and clapped their hands;
grisettes and bonnes smiled and showed their
white teeth; old soldiers drew themselves up
stiffly, and assumed a critical air, now and then
perhaps passing their hands across their eyes
with joy and pride when a son or a nephew
(décoré) marched or rode past among the
"Premiere Légère" or the Cuirassiers, and nodded
shako or helmet to them as they passed. The
men of Austerlitz, the men of Marengo, were
there, looking at the youths of the last revolution,
and brown-faced striplings fresh from Algiers.

There were many blanks in the ranks of the
National Guard, and that indicated mischief and
dislike. That keen observer, M. Louis Blanc,
says: " The city was alarmed and weighed down,
and on every face there was a sort of half-defiant
apathy. People were silent and sullen."

At half-past ten the mockery of the festival to
celebrate a restoration of liberty had begun. As
the king passed through the gate of the Tuileries,
the grenadiers threw their muskets forward, and
presented arms, stiff as statues of iron. The king
bowed, and bowed, and still rode on bowing, to
encourage the scanty cheering. The staff was
brilliant. The king was followed by his three
sons, the Dukes of Orleans, Nemours, and
Joinville, close to, and watchful of, their father.
Then came old Marshal Mortier, the Grand
Chancellor of the Legion of Honour, against
whom steel and lead had been powerless for
sixty years. He, too, looked on the alert,
and watched the populace and the blouses
suspiciously, ready to throw himself before the
king, on whom he wasted his devotion. There
were three other marshals rode near him—-
Count Lobau, the Marquis Maison, Minister of
War, and the Count Molitor.

The National Guards were cold and silent.
About half-past twelve the cortége reached
the boulevard of the Temple. An immense
crowd of every age and both sexes crowded the
roadways and the alleys, and filled every window.
The poorer the district the more eager and
numerous the crowd. Opposite the Jardin Turc,
the space being large, the mob was enormous,
and many well-dressed women filled the terrace.

At that moment, M. Bock, a grenadier of the
first battalion of the 8th legion, advanced from
the ranks to present a petition. The 8th legion
occupied the space between the Rue du Temple
and the Rue Saint Ronge, the 7th legion having
been just marched from there to face the Château
d'Eau.

M. Laborde, the king's aide-de-camp, put out
his hand and received the petition. The king
was just passing a tree opposite the last of a
block of buildings adjoining a two-storied café.
There was nothing remarkable about the house;
it was a small mean strip of building, three
stories high, with a dirty awning over the bottom
shop, which was the lowest order of cabaret.
The last window but one had the usual Parisian
outside shutters, and the top windows were open,
with a dingy Venetian blind trailing out and
held up from within half a foot of the bottom.
The interior of such a house one could easily
imagine. Two men in blouses drinking glasses
of inky wine, a grisette and her mother busy
at slop-work, above them some grimy gunsmith
in swarthy attire filing and scraping, busy by
himself, or with some cheery comrade, too
industrious even to throw up the blind and look out.

All at once from no one knows where, comes