Carrel and I left the rue de Richelieu and went to the _National_ offices. The _National_ had scarcely been in existence a year then; it had been started by Thiers, Carrel and the Abbé Louis, at the château de Rochecottes, at the feet of Madame de Dino, under the eye of M. de Talleyrand. The Duc d'Orléans, who had lent the necessary funds, paid, as it were, for the nursing of this infant Hercules, which, eighteen years later, was to seize him round his waist and suffocate him. These offices were situated in the rue Neuve-Saint-Marc, at the corner of the place des Italiens. We found it a hotbed of news. The evening before one of the editors had come in, out of spirits and broken down: he had been scouring the poorest quarters, which are always the easiest to stir up, and, shaking his head, he had pronounced these discouraging words:-- "The people will not be moved!" And when we entered the _National_ offices at two o'clock the people were still quiet; but one could feel that kind of shiver of excitement in the air which made people hurry in their walk and grow paler, they knew not why; like the deep, instinctive terror felt by animals at the approach of an earthquake. From whence arose this shuddering, which was but yet, as it were, upon the surface of society? It is easy to make a guess. The motion of M. Thiers, which had borne forty-five signatures at the foot of the journalists' protest (it had been published in the _Globe_, the _National_, and the _Temps_, and a hundred thousand copies had, perhaps, been printed and distributed in the streets), this motion, we say, had compromised forty-five persons. Now, these forty-five individuals made up a compact body working upon the masses, and each also was a separate force, working upon individual members of society. Each signature was the centre of a more or less wide circumference of friends, employés, clerks, workmen, compositors, journeymen and printers' devils. Each one stirred up his own particular circle, and each individual member of this circle, however humble, was himself an agent and used his influence on his subordinates; therefore, as soon as the impulse was given, it was communicated from great centres to small, the wheels began to turn, and one felt society tremble under the throbbing of an invisible machine, almost as one feels a windmill quiver from the revolution of its sails or a steamboat from the beating of its paddles. Carrel was invited to three different meetings, all for the purpose of organising opposition. One was purely of a Liberal character, bordering on Republicanism, and was held in the rue Saint-Honoré in the house of the chemist Cadet de Gassicourt; the principal members were Thiers, Charles Teste, Anfous, Chevalier, Bastide, Cauchois-Lemaire and Dupont; at this one they discussed a motion as to creating a committee of resistance in every arrondissement (ward), with power to put itself into direct communication with the deputies.