The record of nineteen years ago had been made under a different monarch, according to the laboriously prolix system of M. de Sartines, especially when any foreign subject was concerned; and it extended over many of the large pages, betraying by its faint-brown ink how considerable an interval had elapsed. It set out with the alarm being brought past midnight to the residence of the commissary in the Quartier faubourg St Germain, that a house on the Quai d’Orcay was in flames, and the endeavours made to arrest them, as well as to succour the inhabitants, who had been driven to the garret windows, and were attempting to pass to the contiguous roofs; it stated the narrow escape of a maidservant from a front window of the first floor, where the whole of the apartments were full of smoke, by the aid of a gendarme with a ladder too short to allow him to enter—and of a woman in her night-dress, whose shrieks had first given the alarm, but who had disappeared; till she returned to a corner window with a child in her arms, actually pursued by a bursting flame, but rescued by a man on the top of a wall which abutted there on a manufactory canal flowing at a right angle into the Seine—also of the English gentleman, the tenant of the first floor, who had at first made his way from the street into the basement, out of a fiacre which had brought him from the theatre, but who reappeared half drenched, and panting for breath, amidst the play of the fire-engines. The state of the February night was described as being very dark before the occurrence, with a high wind blowing up the river, where, from the tide, and a period of unusual rain, the water of the Seine made the canal overflow, rising almost to a level with its bridges, yet affording the greater facilities for the jets from the fire-engines, which succeeded ultimately in saving the adjoining structures, and the sheds of the tobacco-manufactory adjacent, with the lower part of the house itself. The situation of the house was also minutely given, to the very contiguity of the two poplar trees growing outside the wall, up from the canal, but by which the _pompeurs_ had found it impossible to climb in their heavy accoutrements—the height of the wall on that side, and the manner in which the end of the house rose like a continuation of it towards the quay, rendering it apparently impossible, even when one had gained the top of the wall, to reach at all near the solitary first-floor window, in the middle, and higher up. Then followed a detail of the various occupants of the three floors and garrets—on the basement, the proprietor, a widower, elderly and of avaricious habits, whose warehouse of furniture filled three apartments, his sleeping chamber being a closet attached—his clerk, an old man who lived in a fourth apartment with his wife, both acting as porters: above, the family of Monsieur Vilby, the Englishman, consisting at that time of himself, his wife, and infant son, a young female attendant, a