Xavier Durrieu, whose fiery courage never flagged for a single moment, reiterated that he would undertake the printing, and promised that by eight o'clock that evening there should be 40,000 copies of the Proclamation. Time pressed. They separated, after fixing as a rendezvous the premises of the Society of Cabinet-makers in the Rue de Charonne, at eight o'clock in the evening, so as to allow time for the situation to reveal itself. As we went out and crossed the Rue Beautreillis I saw Pierre Leroux coming up to me. He had taken no part in our meetings. He said to me,-- "I believe this struggle to be useless. Although my point of view is different from yours, I am your friend. Beware. There is yet time to stop. You are entering into the catacombs. The catacombs are Death." "They are also Life," answered I. All the same, I thought with joy that my two sons were in prison, and that this gloomy duty of street fighting was imposed upon me alone. There yet remained five hours until the time fixed for the rendezvous. I wished to go home, and once more embrace my wife and daughter before precipitating myself into that abyss of the "unknown" which was there, yawning and gloomy, and which several of us were about to enter, never to return. Arnauld (de l'Ariége) gave me his arm. The two Italian exiles, Carini aril Montanelli, accompanied me. Montanelli took my hands and said to me, "Right will conquer. You will conquer. Oh! that this time France may not be selfish as in 1848, and that she may deliver Italy." I answered him, "She will deliver Europe." Those were our illusions at that moment, but this, however, does not prevent them from being our hopes to-day. Faith is thus constituted; shadows demonstrate to it the light. There is a cabstand before the front gate of St. Paul. We went there. The Rue St. Antoine was alive with that indescribable uneasy swarming which precedes those strange battles of ideas against deeds which are called Revolutions. I seemed to catch, in this great working-class district, a glimpse of a gleam of light which, alas, died out speedily. The cabstand before St. Paul was deserted. The drivers had foreseen the possibility of barricades, and had fled. Three miles separated Arnauld and myself from our houses. It was impossible to walk there through the middle of Paris, without being recognized at each step. Two passers-by extricated us from our difficulty. One of them said to the other, "The omnibuses are still running on the Boulevards." We profited by this information, and went to look for a Bastille omnibus. All four of us got in.