“The authorities are at the door, ready to read to you the decree which discharges you from custody. The tribunal is growing tender; it has demanded but three lives today. It sees no ground for accusing you, and it has ordered the Citizen Edmond Thierry to find his way to his father,—if he can. The ungrateful villain nearly threw me on my back as I opened the wicket to set him free.” “Ladies and gentlemen,” said De Fabien, who suddenly recovered both his courage and his colour, “I wish you a good night, and luck like mine. I am now eligible to the _bals à la guillotine_, for I have had a relative who has been beheaded.” “Poor Madame de Charry!” exclaimed the sympathetic ladies, as the tears ran down their cheeks with laughing at the Chevalier’s drollery. “Poor _me_!” said M. de Bohun, “for now Edmond is gone, who will sew on a button for me, or mend a rent in my clothes?” ACT II. The Dean of St. Patrick’s has immortalized an Irish festival of the eighteenth century, by declaring that “O’Rourke’s noble feast will ne’er be forgot By those who were there,—or those who were not.” Some such memories will cling for ever about the last of the great European Congresses,—that of Vienna. It will be a costly reminiscence for Europe as long as the world endures; and no one is likely to forget the assembly of monarchs and statesmen who, after arranging the affairs of the universe, amused themselves by enacting the French vaudeville of ‘La Danse Interrompue,’ and, in the very middle of that ominously-named piece, received intelligence that Napoleon had escaped from Elba, and had thus interrupted their dance indeed.