There were whisperings and mutterings, and grave doubts expressed even in high places; but in the lower strata of society, among the _bourgeoisie_ and the proletariat, there were sullen, ominous thunder-growls boding ill for a government which had long since forfeited all claim to popularity; the whole affair was shrouded in a mystery which was more than enough to excite the minds of a highly inflammable people. Republicans and Socialists had for some years been on the war-path: now they were goaded by laws gagging the press and proscribing public meetings. These laws, initiated by Guizot and furiously opposed by Thiers, brought about the final crash; the revolution broke out, and on the 22nd of February, 1848, the King and his Queen were hounded out by the mob of Paris. A few days later a slippery old gentleman with a curious pear-shaped head and profuse expressions of geniality—a commodity which he always kept in stock—landed at Newhaven. He said he was Mr. Smith. Whether the Duc de Praslin died in prison, a suicide as well as a murderer, or whether his flight was connived at by the mighty, is one of those secrets which will remain hidden till the Day of Judgment. It used to be said that members of his family were in the habit of paying annual visits to him in England. The French authorities always scouted this idea; but many years later facts came to my knowledge which proved that one of his very near relations did make a practice of coming to England periodically, and that during those expeditions he was for the most part lost to the sight of his friends. Whither he went no one knew. It is a strange coincidence that the fall of the last two monarchies in France—that of Louis Philippe and that of Louis Napoléon—should in each case have been heralded by a single murder. These were crimes which stirred the wildest passions, the fiercest and most unthinking resentments of the mob, and however unjustly, the penalty for them was paid by those who had no hand in them. CHAPTER III ETON There are days in a man’s life which he never forgets; his first day at school is one of them. My maiden appearance at Eton was in 1846, sixty-nine years ago at this time of writing, but that lovely day in May is as fresh in my memory as if it had been last week. I was only nine years old, but I suppose that I was rather impressionable for my time of life, and my young imagination had been fired by the enthusiasm of my father and many of his friends, whose chief pride always had seemed to lie in the fact that they were old “Eton fellows.”