'I went with the others, first to the statue of Strasbourg, which was decorated with flowers, and to which a sort of worship was paid on account of the gallant defence of the city, Labouchere making another speech, and then on to the Tuileries. A Turco detained us for some time at the gates by dancing in face of the crowd. But at last they insisted on the private gardens being thrown open, and then swept in, and we passed through the whole of the apartments. Privates of the National Guard stationed themselves as sentries in all the rooms, and not a thing was touched, an inscription proclaiming "Death to thieves" being chalked upon every wall. Precautions were necessary, for the police, knowing themselves to be unpopular, had disappeared. Indeed the first proof to me in the early morning of the certainty of a revolution had been that on the boulevards the squads had passed me, relieving themselves in the usual way, but no squads going to take their places. The crowds were orderly, but the eagles, of course, were broken down, and a bit of one from the principal guardroom hangs still on the wall of my London study. The next day I wrote to my grandmother: "I would not have missed yesterday for the world. Louis Blanc and other exiles have come over, but I fear that the great northern line will be cut by Wednesday, and then you will get no more news from me." 'I had dined with Lord Lyons on the previous evening in such a costume as had never till then been seen at dinner at the Embassy, and had listened with him to the bands playing the "Marseillaise" and "Mourir pour la Patrie," and on the morning of the 5th I had seen Louis Blanc. On the 6th I wrote that I feared that my letters would be stopped. In the course of the following days I visited all the forts with Alfred Tresca, of the Arts et Métiers, who had been set by Government, although a civil engineer, to organize the bastion powder-magazines, so I saw the defences well. Alfred Tresca was afterwards arrested while I was in Paris under the Commune, in the first week in April, 1871, for refusing to point out where his powder was.