'Very ill,' said Scheffer. 'He feels that he has compromised the happiness of his wife, whom he married not long before the coup d'état.'
'Changarnier at Malins, who lives alone and has only himself to care for, supports it much better.'
Tocqueville and I walked home together.
'Scheffer,' he said, 'did not tell all that happened at the Château d'Eau. Men seldom do when they fight over their battles.'
'The insurgents by burrowing through walls had got into a house in the rear of our position. They manned the windows, and suddenly fired down on us from a point whence no danger had been feared. This caused a panic among the National Guards, a force of course peculiarly subject to panics. They turned and ran back 250 yards along the Boulevard St. Martin, carrying with them the Line and Lamoricière himself. He endeavoured to stop them by outcries, and by gesticulations, and indeed by force. He gave to one man who was trying to run by him a blow with his fist, so well meant and well directed that it broke his collar bone.'
'At length he stopped them, re-formed them, and said: "Now you shall march, I at your head, and the drummer beating the charge, as if you were on parade, up to that house." They did so. After a few discharges, which miraculously missed Lamoricière, the men in the house deserted it.'
'What were you doing at the Château d'Eau?' I asked.
'We were marching,' he said, 'with infantry and artillery on the Boulevard du Temple, across which there was a succession of barricades, which it was necessary to take one by one.
'As we advanced in the middle, our sappers and miners got into the houses on each side, broke through the party walls, and killed the men at the windows.'
'Those three days,' he continued, 'impress strongly on my mind the dangers of our present state.'