d Metternich, a dreamer in his villa at
Rennweg, shook his head. As to Soult, the man of Austerlitz after
Napoleon, he did what he ought to do, on the very day of the Crime he
died, Alas! and Austerlitz also.

THE SECOND DAY--THE STRUGGLE.

CHAPTER I.

THEY COME TO ARREST ME

In order to reach the Rue Caumartin from the Rue Popincourt, all Paris
has to be crossed. We found a great apparent calm everywhere. It was one
o'clock in the morning when we reached M. de la R----'s house. The
_fiacre_ stopped near a grated door, which M. de la R---- opened with a
latch-key; on the right, under the archway, a staircase ascended to the
first floor of a solitary detached building which M. de la R----
inhabited, and into which he led me.

We entered a little drawing-room very richly furnished, lighted with a
night-lamp, and separated from the bedroom by a tapestry curtain
two-thirds drown. M. de la R---- went into the bedroom, and a few minutes
afterwards came back again, accompanied by a charming woman, pale and
fair, in a dressing-gown, her hair down, handsome, fresh, bewildered,
gentle nevertheless, and looking at me with that alarm which in a young
face confers an additional grace. Madame de la R---- had just been
awakened by her husband. She remained a moment on the threshold of her
chamber, smiling, half asleep, greatly astonished, somewhat frightened,
looking by turns at her husband and at me, never having dreamed perhaps
what civil war really meant, and seeing it enter abruptly into her rooms
in the middle of the night under this disquieting form of an unknown
person who asks for a refuge.

I made Madame de la R---- a thousand apologies, which she received with
perfect kindness, and the charming woman profited by the incident to go
and caress a pretty little girl of two years old who was sleeping at the
end of the room in her cot, and the child whom she kissed caused her to
forgive the refugee who had awakened her.

While chatting M. de la R---- lighted a capital fire in the grate, and
his wife, with a pillow and cushions, a hooded cloak belonging to him,
and a pelisse belonging to herself, improvised opposite the fire a bed
on a sofa, somewhat short, and which we lengthened by means of an
arm-chair.

During the deliberation in the Rue Popincourt, at which I had just
presided, Baudin had lent me his pencil to jot down some names. I still
had this pencil with me. I made use of it to write a letter to my