literary world needed to know any other. This news was that next day he was to read a play in five acts. I saw the moment coming when he was about to anticipate the right of the Committee and read me his play. But the reading of the finest drama the world ever saw would not have consoled me for losing the smallest detail of the play which Paris was at that moment putting on the stage. I leapt into a cab and escaped from the reading. I gave the driver Carrel's address. Since the present crisis had arisen, Carrel was looked upon by the younger members of the Opposition as their leader, elected, if not publicly, at least by tacit consent. I had become acquainted with Armand Carrel at M. de Leuven's, who, since the return to France of the young political exile, after the coronation of Charles X., had placed him on the editorial staff of the _Courrier_; he lived, if I remember rightly, in the rue Monsigny or near by. As he died in 1836, he is already, to the young generation of between twenty and twenty-five years of age, but a historical figure. At the time of which we are now speaking, he was a man of twenty-eight, of medium height, with a calm and retreating forehead, dark hair, small, lively, flashing eyes, a long sharp nose, thin and rather pale lips, with white teeth and a bilious complexion. Although Carrel professed the most advanced of Liberal opinions, as is often the case with men of great intellect and of refined organisation, he had the most aristocratic habits imaginable, and this made the contrast between his words and his appearance very strange. He almost invariably wore patent leather boots, a black cravat tied tight round his neck, a black frock-coat buttoned up all but the last button, a waistcoat of white piqué or of chamois leather and grey trousers. His whole get-up revealed the military style of the former officer. This warlike quality had, to some extent, passed from Carrel's body into his mind. Charlemagne signed his treaties with the pommel of his sword and enforced them with its point; and so with Carrel: his articles always seemed to have been written with a steel point, similar to those used by the ancients, which left deep traces of sharpness on their tablets of wax. But Carrel's polemical style of writing was very fine, noble and frank; he boldly showed his front to his enemies: it was in some way similar both to Pascal's and Paul-Louis Courier's. He had received but little historical education, except about our neighbours across the Channel; he was secretary to Augustin Thierry while he wrote his fine book on the Conquest of England by the Normans (_Conquête de l'Angleterre par les Normands_). Carrel, with his usual earnestness, had picked up the crumbs that fell from that sumptuous table, and had compiled an abridged History of England. We were good enough friends, although, perhaps, we were not quite just to one another; he looked upon me as too much of a poet, and I looked upon him as too much of a soldier.