"General La Fayette shook hands with me! Hurrah for General La Fayette!" Charras arrived, in due course, with his hundred or hundred and fifty men. "Here I am, General," he said. "Ah! You, my young friend!" said La Fayette. "You are welcome"; and he embraced him. "Yes, General, I am here, but I am not alone." "Who have you with you?" "My hundred and fifty men." "And what have they done?" "They have acted like heroes, General! They took the prison Montaigu, the barrack de l'Estrapade and the one in the rue de Babylone." "Bravo!" "Yes, you may indeed say so! But now there is nothing left for them to take, what must I do with them?" "Why, tell them to return quietly to their homes." Charras laughed. "Homes? You don't really mean that, General!" "I do, really; they must be fatigued after the tasks they have performed." "But, General, three-quarters of the brave fellows have no homes to go to, and the other quarter, if they went home, would not find either a morsel of bread or a halfpenny to buy any with." "Ah! the deuce! that alters the case," said the general. "Then let them have a hundred sous per head." Charras submitted the general's proposal to his men. "Oh!... Come now!" they said, "does he think we are fighting for the sake of money?" Baude ordered a distribution of bread and meat and, when it was done, Charras camped with his troop upon the square of the Hôtel de Ville. Madame Guyet-Desfontaines' cup of chocolate and bottle of Bordeaux wine were now things of the past, and I felt as pressing a desire for a piece of bread to eat as had General Dubourg when he reached the Hôtel de Ville. I went to a wine merchant's at the corner of la place de Grève and the quai Pelletier and asked for some dinner. His house was riddled with bullets and he had become the possessor of a fine selection of grapeshot. He meant to set them up above his door as a future sign, with the following words inscribed above them:-- AUX PRUNES DE MONSIEUR You know that the Comte d'Artois, as in the case of all the younger brothers of the kings of France, was styled "Monsieur" before he became Charles X. I approved the happy notion of the wine merchant, and flattered him so cleverly that I wheedled him out of a bottle of wine, a piece of bread and a sausage. I was fully determined not to lose sight of the Hôtel de Ville and to take note of all that passed there. I found that Revolutions had an extremely amusing side. Pray excuse me, it was the first I had seen. Now that I have lived to see a third I do not find them quite so funny.