“Down with the Corps Legislatif?” was suggested. “No! No!” “Long live the Republic?” “No, it is too soon for that.” _“Vive la France?”_ “No, that is too well known.” “Death to the Prussians?” “Better wait for that.” But suddenly the crowd found the word, a word which indicated the tenor of the Revolution which was to follow: a word which like a ray of light was to conciliate a hundred opinions, to gather into one collective act a hundred individual energies, a simple, powerful, irresistible, sonorous word, the voice of the people pronouncing the people’s sentence upon that imperial _régime_, which, for close on a score of years, had been preparing the ruin of France; the word was _déchéance_ (dethronement). To the refrain of that word scanned thus—_Dé—ché—ance_, and sung to the refrain of _Les Lampions_, the crowd thronged westward on to the Place de la Bastille, to awake that revolutionary quarter, the Faubourg Saint Antoine, asleep for twenty years. Then back again it surged on to the boulevards, there to deliberate and to postpone the attack on the Corps Legislatif until the morrow, Sunday. In the small hours of that Sabbath morning Juliette from her window watched the boulevards emptying, the people going home, but not to sleep. Lights in the windows announced a vigil—_la veillée des larmes_. _“Il semble”_, writes Mme. Adam, _“que sous chaque toit un malade est à toute extrêmité et qu’on passe la nuit à son chevet. Ce malade c’est La France à l’agonie.”_[178] The 4th of September dawned resplendent, an ideal autumn day. “The sun shines to-day,” writes Juliette in her diary.[179] “It is the people’s sun. There is no fear of rain damping our patriotism.”[180] In this diary, which she kept for her daughter, who was away in Normandy, staying near Granville with her grandparents, Mme. Adam, as they passed, described the events of those memorable hours. By ten o’clock all Paris was in the streets, thronging towards the Place de la Concorde and the bridge leading to the Chambre des Députés, where the members of the Corps Legislatif were to meet at twelve o’clock. Meanwhile, as the surging crowd outside grew larger and larger and more and more clamant, in the smoking-room of the House of Representatives perplexed deputies were vainly seeking some new form of government to replace the Empire. They were hurriedly turning over pages describing those numerous constitutional experiments which France had been trying since the Great Revolution; between the Palais Legislatif and the Palais des Tuileries, where the Empress was on the point of flight, all the time despairing ministers were hurrying to and fro. To Thiers’ house on the Place St. Georges the dying Mérimée was dragging himself to entreat, on behalf of a woman and her son, the intervention of _le petit grand homme_ on whose wisdom every one counted.