"Guizot is your personal enemy, and, perhaps, is giving the order to arrest you at this very moment, as in the case of Cabet and Armand Carrel."
The three commissioners thanked the unknown person; but, not believing there was any danger—or at least, not any imminent—they went on their way, got out of the carriage, and had themselves announced to the king. The king soon gave orders for them to go in. At the moment when he was just passing through the door, M. Laffitte turned round to his two colleagues, and whispered to them—
"Let us be on our guard, gentlemen! he is going to try to make us laugh."
It was a strange moment to choose for fearing such a means of controversy. But M. Laffitte boasted he knew the king better than any body else. It was an assumption allowable to the man who had given him his popularity, and sold the forest of Breteuil.
The king, in fact, received the three deputies with a tranquil face, almost smiling. He told them to be seated, which indicated that the audience would be long, or, at all events, would be as long as the gentlemen wished it to be. Louis Blanc, who was informed by all three actors in that scene, has related it in full detail. I will not add anything, therefore, to it, but put it in dialogue form, which makes it perhaps more vivid.
The situation was a grave one: insurrection at Lyons, insurrection at Grenoble, insurrection in la Vendée, riots or revolution everywhere. But there remained the question as to what were the causes of these bloody troubles and terrible collisions. According to the opinion of the three deputies, it was the reaction brought about by getting farther day by day from the programme of July. The king said it was the spirit of Jacobinism, not properly extinguished under the Convention, the Directory and the Empire, which strove to revive the Days of the Terror. He instanced the appearance of the man with the red flag, whom the Republicans sent back to the rue de Jerusalem, whence he made out he had come.
A conversation based on such lines between a barrister and a king threatened to be of long duration. A sinister sound which was to be heard in the streets of Paris more than once under the reign of Louis-Philippe now made itself heard, and cut the conversation in half, as a blow from a scythe cuts a snake in two.
"Sire, do I hear wrongly?" asked Laffitte, trembling, "Is that cannon?"
"Yes;... they have pushed on," said the king, "to take the Monastery of Saint-Merry without too great loss of life."