One night we had to sleep on the floor for fear of stray bullets; and that was a fearful joy never to be forgotten--it almost kept us awake! Peering out of the school-room windows at dusk, we saw great fires, three or four at a time. Suburban retreats of the over-wealthy, in full conflagration; and all day the rattle of distant musketry and the boom of cannon a long way off, near Montmartre and Montfaucon, kept us alive. Most of the boys went home, and some of them never came back--and from that day the school began to slowly decline. Père Brossard--an ancient "Brigand de la Loire," as the republicans of his youth were called--was elected a representative of his native town at the Chamber of Deputies; and possibly that did the school more harm than good--ne sutor ultra crepidam! as he was so fond of impressing on _us_! However, we went on pretty much as usual through spring and summer--with occasional alarms (which we loved), and beatings of _le rappel_--till the July insurrection broke out. My mother and sister had left Mlle. Jalabert's, and now lived with my father near the Boulevard Montmartre. And when the fighting was at its height they came to fetch me home, and invited Barty, for the Rohans were away from Paris. So home we walked, quite leisurely, on a lovely peaceful summer evening, while the muskets rattled and the cannons roared round us, but at a proper distance; women picking linen for lint and chatting genially the while at shop doors and porter's lodge-gates; and a piquet of soldiers at the corner of every street, who felt us all over for hidden cartridges before they let us through; it was all entrancing! The subtle scent of gunpowder was in the air--the most suggestive smell there can be. Even now, here in England, the night of the fifth of November never comes round but I am pleasantly reminded of the days when I was "en pleine révolution" in the streets of Paris with my father and mother, and Barty and my little sister--and genial _piou-pious_ made such a Conscientious examination of our garments. Nothing brings back the past like a sound or a smell--even those of a penny squib! Every now and then a litter borne by soldiers came by, on which lay a dead or wounded officer. And then one's laugh died suddenly out, and one felt one's self face to face with the horrors that were going on. Barty shared my bed, and we lay awake talking half the night; dreadful as it all was, one couldn't help being jolly! Every ten minutes the sentinel on duty in the court-yard below would sententiously intone: "Sentinelles, prenez-garde à vous!" And other sentinels would repeat the cry till it died away in the distance, like an echo.