In his eyes I evidently passed for a prince travelling incognito. To give twenty francs as _denier à Dieu_ for a room at a hundred and twenty!... Such a thing had never been heard of. Twenty francs! it was a sixth of the rent!... So his wife instantly asked for the honour of looking after me. I granted her this favour for five francs per month--always with the same regal air. From there, I ran to General Verdier's to get up my appetite, and I told him the good news. I had left Paris at such short notice, on the previous Monday, that I had not had time to ascend his four flights of stairs. I mounted them, this time, fruitlessly: the general had taken advantage of its being Sunday and had gone out. I followed his example: I strolled about the boulevards,--the only place where I ran no risk of being lost,--and I reached the _Café de la Porte-Saint-Honoré_ at the end of my strolling. Suddenly, through the windows, I saw someone I knew: it was Hiraux, the son of good old Hiraux, who had so unsuccessfully endeavoured to make a musician of me. I entered the café. Hiraux had recently bought it: he was the proprietor of it.... I was in his house!... Although he was slightly older than myself, we had been very good chums in our childhood. He kept me to dinner. While waiting for dinner, he put all the journals of the establishment before me. Some of those papers have since disappeared. The chief of them at that time were: the _Journal des Débats_, always under the direction of the brothers Bertin, and a supporter of the Government. It reflected the views of Louis XVIII. and of M. de Villèle--namely, a moderate and conciliatory Royalism, a policy of optimism and vacillation; the system, in fact, by which, in the midst of the plots of the Carbonari and the intrigues of the Extreme Party, Louis XVIII. managed to die almost in tranquillity: if not on the throne, at any rate close by it. The old _Constitutionnel_--of Saint-Albin, Jay, Tissot and Évariste Dumoulin--was suppressed one day for an article which the Censorship placed on the Index, an article which somehow had managed to get inserted without any trace of the claws and teeth of the censors. Then, with a rapidity of decision which indicated the extreme devotion the _Constitutionnel_ of every epoch has always exhibited in its own cause, it bought for a mere song the _Journal du Commerce_, which had four hundred subscribers; and, under the title of the _Journal du Commerce_ appeared next morning: it need hardly be said that the good old rogue was recognised under this transparent disguise, and just about the time when I arrived in Paris, it had resumed, or was about to resume, its old title, so dear to the citizens of Paris. The _Constitutionnel_ was very timid: it represented the Liberal opinion, and never really breathed out thunder and lightning except against the Jesuits, towards whom it had vowed the same cruel and magnificent hatred that nowadays it fulminates against _demagogues_.