"Parbleu!" replied M. Maurice Duval, laughing, "that means that with your fine measures of conciliation we, you and I, shall be flung out of the windows!" The betting was a hundred to one that the prophecy would be fulfilled; so the general, his staff and the préfet left the defence of the préfecture to a detachment of firemen, and hastened into the hall of the Mairie. They found a large number of the National Guard collected there to defend the Hôtel de Ville and the municipal council, if these should be attacked, but they did not seem in the least degree disposed to extend that protection to the préfet and General Saint-Clair. The latter was not mistaken, for he felt there was something unknown and more portentous beneath all this than a provincial riot; it was Bastide and the brothers Vasseur--old campaigners, whose first stripes traced back to Carbonarism--who were leading the movement. At the cry that went up in the town of "Guibert is dead!" Bastide had conceived an idea which he had communicated to his companions; it was to pick up the body and carry it about the streets, shouting--"To arms!" We know what a similar procession, leaving the Vaudeville Theatre in 1830, had produced, and we have since seen what the same manœuvre did after the famous discharge of the 14th of the line on the boulevard des Capucines. Consequently, Bastide sent men to Guibert's dwelling. The dead body was to be borne to the house occupied by the brothers Vasseur, and the cortège was, from there, to march through all the streets of the town. Whilst they were going to Guibert's house, the younger Vasseur reorganised the volunteer corps with which, in 1830, he had attempted to invade Savoy. A desperate chamois-hunter, he had then carried on a most curious warfare among the mountains, which deserved a historian all to itself. Later, he was exiled from France, and travelled over Mexico and Texas; and, on his return, he was seized with cholera, and died. He was a man of lofty purpose, adored at Grenoble, specially by the men with whom he had made the strange enterprise of stirring up and conquering Savoy.