Let us first of all explain how these fragments of information fell into our hands. To do this in one step we must skip over a period of eighteen years; and, instead of the young man who took active part in all we have just read, substitute the mature man who stood aside, and sadly watched the passing of the events of that long reign; we must suppose the Lieutenant-general, to whose proclamation we have just listened, to be a king, also grown old and unpopular and driven away in his turn; we must imagine ourselves to have left behind Sunday morning, August 1830, for three o'clock in the afternoon of 24 February 1848. Then, the king gone and the Tuileries seized and the Republic proclaimed, I returned alone, sad and anxious, more of a Republican than ever, but of the opinion that the Republic was ill-constituted, ill-matured and ill-promulgated; I returned, my heart depressed by the spectacle of a wife cruelly repulsed, two children separated from their mother, two princes put to flight, one hunted through the rostral columns of the Place de la Concorde, the other along the circular staircases of the Palace of the Deputies; I returned, wondering if all I had seen and heard could actually be true, or whether I was not rather under the influence of a strange nightmare, a mysterious vision; I returned and, metaphorically speaking, felt myself to see if I could really be alive--for it is sometimes as easy for us to doubt our own existence as to doubt the weirdly strange events that we see passing under our very eyes;--I returned, I say, by the Tuileries, with its windows all open and its doors broken in, as on that famous 29 July which I have described at, perhaps, too great length; but how could I help myself? There are some memories which fill such a space in our lives that we feel compelled to impress them upon the lives of others. I was possessed with the idea of looking over the château that I had entered once before and to begin in the same way, at the apartments of King Louis-Philippe, on 24 February 1848, as I had through the rooms that belonged to King Charles and on 29 July 1830. The account of what I saw will be given elsewhere. I have only one thing to relate, and here it is. As I went through the king's cabinet, where all kinds of papers lay scattered over the floor, all soiled with mud, in the midst of these forgotten, useless papers, condemned to the fire and oblivion, I detected some pages covered with characters which made me tremble. It was the king's writing; that very writing which, twenty-five years before, had often passed under my eyes. A patriot of 1848, as ragged as a former patriot of 1830, kept guard over the king's broken-open desk. "Comrade," I said to the man, "may I have some of these papers that litter the floor?" "You can take them," he replied; "they are probably left because they are of no value." So I took them.