I returned home, I must confess, completely cast down. I do not know which day this was, but I think it must have been the 2nd of August.
The powder had arrived with Bard that morning; I had handed it over to two students of the École polytechnique, who gave me a receipt for it and took it to la Salpétrière. It must have been on the 2nd, for I saw M. de Latour-Foissac, whom I knew by sight, driving to the Palais-Royal; I had met him at the house of Madame de Sériane, sister of General Coëtlosquet.
M. de Latour-Foissac was taking the answer to the lieu-tenant-general's letter of the previous day, the letter substituted, as we know, for the one written by M. Dupin. This answer was the abdication of Charles X. and that of the Duc d'Angoulême; it gave permission to the Duc d'Orléans to proclaim the Duc de Bordeaux under the title of Henri V. The lieutenant-general declined to receive the messenger, but he took the message.
Now, what was to be done? M. Sébastiani was consulted, and advised a Regency. Béranger was for a Monarchy. The Duc d'Orléans cut the difficult knot by saying—
"Be Regent? I would rather be nothing at all than Regent.... At the very first stomach-ache Henri V. might have, it would be proclaimed upon the housetops that I had poisoned him."
And from that moment there was no longer any doubt in anyone's mind that Louis-Philippe would become king.
The abdication was dated from Rambouillet, as the letter had been. Rambouillet was only thirty-six miles from Paris; Charles X. had still fourteen thousand men round him, with thirty-eight pieces of cannon. He had something even better than those—he had the two letters of the Duc d'Orléans. Charles X. could not remain at Rambouillet; by some combination or other he must be forced to leave Rambouillet, and, more than that, France itself. It did not prove a difficult matter to manage to bring this to pass—the means were probably already prepared. Meantime, on 2 August, General Hulot was sent to Cherbourg to take up the command of the four departments which separate Paris from the Channel; the same day also M. Dumont-d'Urville received orders to start for Havre with all haste, and there to freight two transport ships. The day before, they risked inserting in the Courrier français the protest of the Duc d'Orléans against the birth of the Duc de Bordeaux. The reader knows how this proclamation, which in 1820 had caused the exile of the Duc d'Orléans, suggested a doubt as to the legitimacy of the young prince. Well, on 1 August the Courrier français was asked to give it a place in one of its next issues. It did not keep the future king waiting long in impatience! Next morning, 2 August, the Courrier contained the protest. Very likely it was set up by the very same compositors who had printed the placard stating that the Orléans princes were Valois by descent, and not Bourbons.
So all these things happened on 2 August, for on the 3rd I was awakened by the call to arms, which was being beaten furiously in the street, and by Delanoue, who burst into my room, a double-barrelled gun in his hand. A gun was such an unusual toilet accessory in the case of Delanoue that I was more struck by it than by all the rest of the commotion.
"What the dickens is happening?" I asked him.
"Charles X. is marching on Paris with twenty thousand men and fifty pieces of cannon, my dear boy, and all Paris on its part has risen to march against him. Will you come too?"