"I ran home without stopping, and fell like a bomb into the midst of my family. My mother fainted; my father stood speechless. They had been told that I had been flung over the pont d'Austerlitz into the Seine. They thought I had died the day before. I was very ill. My father sent me to bed and I nearly had brain fever. I am told, Monsieur Dumas, that this story will interest you, and I send it you.
"Ah! You whose voice is powerful say clearly and say often—
"'ANYTHING RATHER THAN CIVIL WAR!'"
What the poor child said is only too true: there were terrible acts of vengeance done on that fatal 6 June, by both the troops and the National Guard. It is a happiness to mention here the name of General Tiburce Sébastiani, whose unending kindness has made us forget (and even worse than forget), the welcome his eldest brother gave us on our arrival in Paris.
General Tiburce Sébastiani, better than any one, could raise the blood-stained veil which we throw over those atrocities; for he was a providence to the wounded whom they finished off slowly, and to the prisoners whom they meant to shoot. Not being able to stand, I had sat down in a chair in the Café de Paris, I think it was, and there I waited for news, when, all at once, cries resounded of "Vive le roi!" uttered by the National Guard, and the king appeared on horseback accompanied by the Minister of the Interior, for War and for Commerce. At the club in the rue de Choiseul, he stopped and held out his hand to a group of armed National Guards; even those who, sixteen years later, were to overthrow him, uttered cries of savage joy at the honour he was paying them. He then continued on his way. When I saw him pass, calm and smiling and unconcerned about the danger he was incurring, I felt a sort of moral vertigo, and I asked myself if the man who saluted to these many cheers was not verily a man elect, and if one had the right to strike a blow at a power with which God Himself, by declaring for him, seemed to side. And at each fresh attempt at assassination made against him, from which he escaped safe and sound, I put the same question to myself, and, each time, my conviction got the better of the doubt, and I said—"No, things cannot remain as they are!" The traces of this conviction will be discovered all through my works—in the Epilogue to Gaule et France, in my letter addressed from Reichenau to the Duc d'Orléans, in my visit to Arenenberg, in my articles on the death of the Duc d'Orléans.
This ride seemed to open the series of attempted assassinations of Louis-Philippe; for the attempt at M. Berthier de Sauvigny's cabriolet, on the place du Carrousel, cannot seriously be regarded as an attempt on the king. On the quay not far from the place de Grève, a young woman lay with her wounded husband's rifle to her cheek; but the weapon was too heavy, and her hand too weak: the weight of the gun lowered her hand and the shot was not sent. The king returned about two o'clock. M. Guizot awaited him in his cabinet. The statesman and the king remained together for an hour. No one knows what was decided during that tête-à-tête; but we may be sure that M. Guizot, according to the character we know of him, would not be for conciliatory measures. As M. Guizot left by one door, an open carriage brought MM. François Arago, Laffitte and Odilon Barrot. I take the following details from the lips of our famous savant himself. He reminded me of them as he leant on my arm during the walk of 26 or 27 February 1848, to the Bastille. He was then a member of the Provisional Government which reigned for a brief space over the kingdom of Louis-Philippe.
An open carriage, as we said, containing MM. Arago, Laffitte and Odilon Barrot entered the Tuileries courtyard. Scarcely had it turned the corner of the gateway, when a stranger stopped the horses, and ran excitedly to the window. "Do not enter," he said.
"Why not?" asked Odilon Barrot.
"Guizot is leaving."
"Very well, what then?"