This spirit of lawfulness prevailed everywhere: it showed itself at two opposite meetings, one at M. Cadet-Gassicourt's[215] the other at General Gourgaud's. M. Périer belonged to that middle class which had constituted itself the heir of the people and the soldier. He had courage, stability of ideas: he flung himself bravely across the revolutionary torrent to dam it; but his life was too much taken up with his health and he was too careful of his fortune: "What can you do with a man," said M. Decazes to me, "who is always examining his tongue in a looking-glass?" The mob increased in size and began to appear under arms. The officer of the Gendarmerie came to inform the Maréchal de Raguse that he had not enough men and that he feared lest he should be driven back: then the marshal made his military dispositions. It was half-past four in the evening of the 27th before orders reached the barracks to take up arms. The Paris Gendarmerie, supported by a few detachments of the Guard, tried to restore the traffic in the Rues Richelieu and Saint-Honoré. One of these detachments was assailed, in the Rue du Duc de Bordeaux[216], by a shower of stones. The leader of the detachment refrained from firing, when a shot from the Hôtel Royal, in the Rue des Pyramides, decided the question: it appeared that a certain Mr. Folks, who lived at this hotel, had taken up his gun and fired at the Guards from his window. The soldiers replied with a volley at the house, and Mr. Folks fell dead with his two servants. This is the way in which those English, who live safe and sheltered in their island, go to carry revolutions to other nations; you find them in the four corners of the world mixed up in quarrels with which they have no concern: so long as they can sell a piece of calico, what care they about plunging a nation into every kind of calamity? What right had this Mr. Folks to shoot at French soldiers? Was it the British Constitution that Charles X. had violated? If anything could stigmatize the July fighting, it would be that it was begun by a bullet fired by an Englishman[217]. [Sidenote: The first shot fired.] The first fighting, which began the day's work of the 27th a little before five o'clock in the evening, ceased at nightfall. The gunsmiths and sword-cutlers gave up their arms to the mob; the street-lamps were broken or remained unlighted; the tricolour flag was hoisted in the darkness on the towers of Notre-Dame: the seizure of the guard-houses, the capture of the arsenal and the powder-magazines, the disarming of the fixed posts, all this was effected without opposition at daybreak on the 28th, and all was finished at eight o'clock. The democratic or proletarian party of the revolution, in blouses or half-naked, was under arms: it was not sparing of its misery or its rags. The mob, represented by electors whom it chose out of different bands, had succeeded in having a meeting called at M. Cadet-Gassicourt's.