"Upon your word of honour, monsieur," the king said, looking the marshal straight in the face, "does the Parisian army really number as many as sixty thousand men, as you have assured me?" The marshal no doubt thought it would be a pious fraud to save the country from civil war. And, perhaps, he may at the same time have believed he was telling the truth: the plain, the road, the whole country between Versailles and Rambouillet was covered with men. "On my word of honour, it is so, sire!" he said. "That is all," said Charles X.; "you may withdraw.... I shall take the advice of the dauphin and of the Duc de Raguse." The commissioners went away; but the dauphin declined to offer advice. "Sire," the Duc de Raguse replied, "I offer my king a final proof of fidelity by counselling him to retreat." "Good, Monsieur le Maréchal," said Charles X. "Let everything be ready for our departure to-morrow at seven in the morning." Alas! thus it was that, compelled, driven into a corner by circumstances, this last of our knightly kings yielded up his sword, not, however, like King John or François I., who did not consider that it could be surrendered except on the field of battle. But the royal cause now suffered a more disastrous defeat than those at Poitiers or Pavia. Whilst all these grave concerns were being debated between the powerful or, rather, between the weak ones of the earth (for were not these kings who had to go away, each in his turn, and die in exile at Goritz or at Claremont among the weakest of men?), I, who had had nearly as much difficulty to conquer my straw stack as Louis-Philippe had to conquer his throne, certainly slept better under my straw roof than the king under his velvet canopy. Towards four or five o'clock in the morning, I was awakened by a well-sustained fusillade; the bullets whizzed past one another and the fiacres which were meant to serve us as barricades against the attack of the Swiss and Royal Guards, ran away in all directions across the plain as fast as their horses could gallop. It proved a false alarm! Good Heavens! what would have happened had the alarm been real? This was what had taken place. Some men had let off their guns as they ran away from Rambouillet, and the camp thought the fight had begun: it rose half asleep and fired haphazard; the first instinct of any man who has a gun in his hands is to use it, and hence the firing and cross-firing which awaked me. Finally, it was all explained and cleared up, and nothing worse resulted than one man killed and two or three wounded; the army thundered out a tremendous _Marseillaise_ and went on its way back to Paris. But Delanoue and I made the journey on foot: our fiacre had been one of the first among the deserters and it was impossible for us to lay hands on it. I remember we returned as far as Versailles across the fields with my dear good friends Alfred and Tony Johannot, who both died before their