"Terrible days. Vanaboste comes and tells us yesterday, at one o'clock, that we must get ready to leave, and that the pupils at Sainte Barbe have gone already with their head. The Panthéon is full of powder, and will soon blow up. Since morning the firing had been slowly, slowly drawing nearer--a strange noise! It was as though some one had shaken millions of nuts over the town in a gigantic cloth. Alfred and I spent the morning in the attic watching the flames of the conflagrations writhing against the sky. He was quite depressed, and I fiercely gay, with a nervous gaiety that forced me to the utterance of outrageous paradoxes--but were they paradoxes?--concerning the fine theories of our professor of philosophy last week. O vision of fate! His last lesson turned upon progress! "We are packing up hastily in order to leave, when one of the masters comes in a state of terror through the little door opening upon the Rue Tournefort, which he bolts behind him. He tells us that the federates would not allow anyone to pass their barricades. It was with great difficulty that he himself has been able to return. We were a long way from the good-natured National Guardsman who said to us on Monday, at the doors of the Lycée: Shout "Long live the Commune!" boys, and you are free." Vanaboste was as white as my paper when he heard this news. The usher hit on the plan of having mattresses spread over the middle of the courtyard, so that if the Panthéon blew up we should fall with less violence. We remained for about two hours in this distress, we pupils fourteen in number, the two assistant masters, and the head master. Alfred and I, who, by an odd contradiction, were almost calm, talking together in a corner. "In spite of the firing, which was constantly drawing nearer, and the bullets cracking against the walls, perhaps a hundred paces off, we had neither of us a perception of reality; the danger appeared to us to be something distant, dim, almost abstract. And we were talking--of what? Of our childhood. 'It has been a happy one,' he said to me, 'even here.' For once I emptied my heart to him, and let him see what I thought of the scholastic lupanar in which, owing to my guardian's selfishness, I have been obliged to grow up. After all, I prefer even this bagnio to his house.