If they did not wish to fight, why did they not retire to Chartres? There, they would have been out of the reach of the Paris populace. Or, better still, to Tours, supported by the Legitimist provinces? Had Charles X. remained in France, the greater part of the army would have remained loyal. The camps at Boulogne and Lunéville were raised and were marching to his aid. My nephew, the Comte Louis, was bringing his regiment, the 4th Light Infantry, which left the ranks only on hearing of the retreat from Rambouillet. M. de Chateaubriand was reduced to escorting the Monarch on a pony to his place of embarkation. If, repairing to some town, protected against a first surprise, Charles X. had convoked the two Chambers, more than half of those Chambers would have obeyed. Casimir Périer, General Sébastiani and a hundred others had waited, had struggled against the tricolour cockade; they dreaded the dangers of a popular revolution: what am I saying? The Lieutenant-general of the Kingdom, summoned by the King and not seeing the battle won, would have stolen away from his partisans and conformed to the royal injunction. The Diplomatic Body, which did not do its duty, would have done it then by placing itself around the Sovereign. The Republic, installed in Paris amidst all the disorders, would not have lasted a month in the face of a regular constitutional government, established elsewhere. Never has the game been lost with so fine a hand, and, when a game is lost in this way, there is no revenge possible: go talk of liberty to the citizens and of honour to the soldiers after the Ordinances of July and the retreat from Saint-Cloud! The time will perhaps come, when a new form of society will have taken the place of the present social order, when war will appear a monstrous absurdity, when its very principle will no longer be understood; but we have not reached that stage yet. In armed quarrels, there are philanthropists who distinguish between the species and who are prepared to swoon away at the mere word of civil war: "Fellow-countrymen killing one another! Brothers, fathers, sons, face to face!"