The Guard was full of Bonaparte's grenadiers. Several officers lost their lives, among others Lieutenant Noirot, a man of extraordinary valour, who in 1813 had received the cross of the Legion of Honour from Prince Eugene for a feat of arms accomplished in one of the redoubts at Caldiera. Colonel de Pleineselve, mortally wounded at the Porte Saint-Martin, had been in the wars of the Empire in Holland, in Spain, with the Grand Army and in the Imperial Guard. At the Battle of Leipzig, he took the Austrian General Merfeld prisoner. Carried by his soldiers to the Hôpital du Gros-Caillou, he refused to have his wounds dressed until all the other wounded of July had been treated. Dr. Larrey[223], whom he had met on other battle-fields, amputated his leg at the thigh; it was too late to save him. Happy those noble adversaries, who had seen so many cannon-balls pass over their heads, if they did not fall before the bullet of one of those liberated convicts whom justice has found again, since the day of victory, in the ranks of the victors! Those galley-slaves were unable to pollute the national republican triumph; they prejudiced only the royalty of Louis-Philippe. Thus perished obscurely, in the streets of Paris, the survivors of those famous soldiers who had escaped from the cannon of the Moskowa, of Lutzen and Leipzig: we massacred under Charles X. those heroes whom we had so greatly admired under Napoleon. They wanted but one man: that man had disappeared at St. Helena. At fall of night, a non-commissioned officer in disguise came to bring orders to the troops at the Hôtel de Ville to fall back upon the Tuileries. The retreat was made hazardous because of the wounded, whom they did not wish to abandon, and of the artillery, which it was difficult to convey across the barricades. Nevertheless it was effected without accident. When the troops returned from the different quarters of Paris, they thought that the King and Dauphin had come back also: looking in vain for the White Flag on the Pavillon de l'Horloge, they uttered the energetic language of the camps. It is not true, as I have shown, that the Hôtel de Ville was captured by the Guards from the people and recaptured from the Guards by the people. When the Guards entered, they encountered no resistance, for there was no one there: the Prefect himself had gone. This boasting weakens and casts a doubt upon the real dangers. The Guards were badly engaged in tortuous streets; the Line, at first by its show of neutrality, and later by its defection, completed the harm which plans fine in theory, but unfeasible in practice, had begun. The 50th Regiment of the Line had arrived at the Hôtel de Ville during the fighting; ready to drop with fatigue, they hastened to retire to the inside of the Hôtel, and lent their exhausted comrades their unused and useless cartridges.