o defy them. He opened a drawer and
said, "Look and see if he is not in here!" The Commissary of Police
darted a furious glance at him: "Lackey, take care!" The lackey was
himself.
These men having gone, it was noticed that several of my papers were
missing. Fragments of manuscripts had been stolen, amongst others one
dated July, 1848, and directed against the military dictatorship of
Cavaignac, and in which there were verses written respecting the
Censorship, the councils of war, and the suppression of the newspapers,
and in particular respecting the imprisonment of a great journalist--Emile
de Girardin:--
"... O honte, un lansquenet
Gauche, et parodiant Cesar dont il herite,
Gouverne les esprits du fond de sa guerite!"
These manuscripts are lost.
The police might come back at any moment, in fact they did come back a
few minutes after I had left. I kissed my wife; I would not wake my
daughter, who had just fallen asleep, and I went downstairs again. Some
affrighted neighbors were waiting for me in the courtyard. I cried out
to them laughingly, "Not caught yet!"
A quarter of an hour afterwards I reached No. 10, Rue des Moulins. It
was not then eight o'clock in the morning, and thinking that my
colleagues of the Committee of Insurrection had passed the night there,
I thought it might be useful to go and fetch them, so that we might
proceed all together to the Salle Roysin.
I found only Madame Landrin in the Rue des Moulins. It was thought that
the house was denounced and watched, and my colleagues had changed their
quarters to No. 7, Rue Villedo, the house of the ex-Constituent Leblond,
legal adviser to the Workmen's Association. Jules Favre had passed the
night there. Madame Landrin was breakfasting. She offered me a place by
her side, but time pressed. I carried off a morsel of bread, and left.
At No. 7, Rue Villedo, the maid-servant who opened the door to me
ushered me into a room where were Carnot, Michel de Bourges, Jules
Favre, and the master of the house, our former colleague, Constituent
Leblond.
"I have a carriage downstairs," I said to them; "the rendezvous is at
the Salle Roysin in the Faubourg St. Antoine; let us go."
This, however, was not their opinion. According to them the attempts
made on the previous evening in the Faubourg St. Antoine had revealed
this portion of the situation; they sufficed; it was useless to persist;
it was obvious that the working-class districts wou
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