The multitude dispersed; sellers of "goodies" cried their _oublies_[309], vendors of trifles hawked about paper mills, which twirled round in the same wind whose breath had shaken the plumes of the funeral car. In the sitting of the Chamber of Deputies of the 20th of May 1834, the President[310] spoke: "General La Fayette's name," he said, "will remain famous in our history.... While expressing to you the sentiments of condolence of the Chamber, I join to these, sir and dear colleague[311], the private assurance of my attachment." After these words, the reporter of the sitting adds, in brackets, the word, "(Laughter)." That is what one of the most serious lives is reduced to. What remains of the death of the greatest men? A grey mantle and a straw cross, as on the corpse of the Duc de Guise, assassinated at Blois. Within earshot of the public crier who was selling for a son, at the gate of the Tuileries Palace, the news of the death of Napoleon, I heard two quacks shouting the praises of their antidotes; and, in the _Moniteur_ of the 21st of January 1793, I read the following words below the account of the execution of Louis XVI.: "Two hours after the execution, nothing remained to show that he who had once been the head of the nation had just undergone the punishment of criminals." Following on those words came this notice: "_Ambroise_, comic opera[312]." The last actor in the drama played fifty years ago, M. de La Fayette remained upon the scene; the last chorus of the Greek tragedy delivers the moral of the play: "Learn, O blind mortals, to turn your eyes upon the last day of life." And I, a spectator seated in an empty play-house, amid deserted boxes and extinguished lights, remain alone, of my time, before the lowered curtain, alone with the silence and the night. [Sidenote: Armand Carrel.] Armand Carrel threatened Philip's future even as General La Fayette beset his past You know how I came to be acquainted with M. Carrel[313]; since 1832, I did not cease to keep up relations with him until the day when I followed him to the Cemetery of Saint-Mandé. Armand Carrel was melancholy; he began to fear that the French were incapable of a rational feeling of liberty; he had a vague presentiment of the shortness of his life: as though it were a thing upon which he did not rely and to which he attached no value, he was always willing to risk it on a cast of the die. If he had fallen in his duel with young Laborie[314], about Henry V., his death would at least have had a great cause and a great stage; probably his funeral would have been honoured by a great display of bloodshed: he left us for a miserable quarrel which was not worth a hair of his head. He was suffering from one of his native attacks of gloom, when he inserted an article on myself, in the _National_, to which I replied by the following note: "PARIS, 5 _May_ 1834.