To Paris, therefore, he repaired; not to that brilliant Paris where sensuality and vice costume themselves in all the brilliant hues derived from the highest intellectual culture, but to the dark and gloomy Paris which lies between the arms of the Seine,--“the Ile St. Louis.” There, amid the vestiges of an extinct feudalism, and the trials of a present wretchedness, he passed his life in strict solitude. In a mean apartment, whose only solace was the view of the river, with a few books picked up on a neighboring stall, and the moving crowd beneath his window to attract his wandering thoughts, he lived his lonely life. The past alone occupied his mind; for the future he had neither care nor interest, but of his bygone life he could dream for hours. These memories he used to indulge each evening in a particular spot; it was an old and ruinous stair which descended to the river, from a little wooden platform, near where he lived. It had been long disused, and suffered to fall into rot and decay. Here he sat, each night, watching the twinkling lights that glittered along the river, and listening to the distant hum of that great hive of pleasure that lay beyond it. That the neighborhood about was one of evil repute and danger, mattered little to one who set small store by his life, and whose stalwart figure and signs of personal prowess were not unknown in the quarter. The unbroken solitude of the spot was its attraction to him, and truly none ever ventured near it after nightfall. There he was sitting one night, as usual, musing, as was his wont. It was a period when men's minds were stirred by the expectation of some great but unknown event; a long political stagnation--the dead sea of hopeless apathy--was beginning to be ruffled by short and fitful blasts that told of a coming hurricane. Vague rumors of a change--scattered sentences of some convulsion, whence proceeding, or whither tending, none could guess--were abroad. The long-sleeping terrors of a past time of blood were once more remembered, and men talked of the guillotine and the scaffold, as household themes. It was the summer of 1830--that memorable year, whose deeds were to form but the prologue of the great drama we are to-day the spectators at. Roland heard these things as he who wanders along the shore at night may hear the brooding signs of a gathering storm, but has no “venture on the sea.” He thought of them with a certain interest, too--but it was with that interest into which no personal feeling enters; for how could great convulsions of states affect _him_ How could the turn of fortune raise or depress him?