The friends turned off from the Hotel de Ville, and, crossing the right branch of the Seine, were under the deep shadows of Notre Dame. But all was tranquil and still. Only the howlings of the wintry blast were heard through the towers and architectural ornaments of the old pile. Up the Rue St. Jacques, into the Quartier Latin, they then proceeded, but the students and the grisettes seemed to be fast asleep. Turning back, they passed the Fish Market, and here a large body of cavalry had bivouacked. Patrols marched to and fro; officers in huge dark cloaks smoked, laughed and chatted, regardless of the morrow. The friends went on. All was dark in the faubourg which succeeded. Not a light gleamed, save, in some lofty casement, the fainting candle of the worn-out needlewoman or of the overtasked student. "Ah!" exclaimed Lamartine, as they passed one of these flickering lights, "who knows what plotting head and ready hand may be beside that candle? Who knows of the weapon burnished, the cartridge filled and the sabre sharpened by that light for the morrow?" "The morrow!" exclaimed M. Dantes; "that morrow decides the fate of France!" And the friends parted. CHAPTER XIX. THE SECOND DAY. The 23d of February dawned on Paris as a city under arms. Artillery frowned in all the public places; the barricades of the preceding night had been thrown down as fast as erected; National Guards thronged the thoroughfares; the people swarmed along the boulevards. In the neighborhood of the Porte St. Denis and the Porte St. Martin, barricades rose as if by magic, but were as if by magic swept away. Cavalry bivouacked in the streets, and ordnance was leveled along their entire extent. The avenues were closely invested, and even old men and women were arrested on their way to their own thresholds. From time to time single shots or volleys of musketry were heard in the distance, and wounded men were carried past to the hospitals. The Government had ordered all public carriages to be cleared from the stands, that material for new barricades might not exist when the old ones were demolished; but the people were busy, too, for the iron railings at the hotel of the Minister of Marine, in the Place de la Concorde, and at the churches of the Assumption and St. Roch had been torn away to supply weapons of attack or defence, or implements with which to tear up the huge square paving stones of Paris for barricades. At eleven o'clock the National Guard of the Second Arrondissement gathered at the opera house in the Rue Lepelletier, and near the office of "Le National." "Vive la Reforme!" "Vive la Garde Nationale!" "Long live the real defenders of the country!"--these were the shouts, intermingled with the choruses of national songs, that now rose from the people and the National Guard.