"'Dear angel,' I answered, 'the revolution is irresistible as the rising tide. A man may have the power to start it, but no man has the power to stay it.'
"'But my father!' she pleaded. 'Tell me! The revolutionists have no love for the police?'
"I was obliged to own, however regretfully, that they had not. For what have policemen ever done, that revolutionists should love them?
"'But, dear angel,' I added, 'one may make exceptions, if only for the sake of proving rules. I wield influence, as you have seen, and I will use it. They shall not hurt one hair upon the Père Dubois's head.'
"Then we kissed each other and said good-bye. Fifine disappeared, lowered over the ramparts by a sentinel; and it was only two days afterwards that the Versailles soldiers entered Paris, and the fighting in the streets began. I do not describe it to you. I do not boast. One brave man behind a barricade, I take it, is very like another. The tide of battle rolled us back from street to street. The traitors slunk away and hid themselves. The day came when we were only a handful of men, hemmed in by an army. Driven from my lodging in Montmartre, I found a garret to sleep in in Belleville. I was there, snatching the few hours' rest which I had earned, when a child found me, and thrust a note, hastily scrawled in pencil, into my hand.
"It was from the Père Dubois. How he had found the means of sending it I do not know; but this is what he said—
"'I am a prisoner of the Commune, locked up with forty other sergents de ville at La Roquette. Your Communists are murdering their prisoners. For the love of God remember your promise to me before it is too late!'
"My mind was made up instantly. Until then I had supposed that a prison was the safest place in Paris in which a sergents de ville could find himself; but since this was not so, I knew how to act.
"Springing from my truckle-bed, upon which I lay only half undressed, I put on my frock-coat and my silk hat, and knotted my red sash round my waist. Then I hurried down seven flights of stairs and almost ran into the arms of our leader, Citizen Ferré.
"'Well, Ferré, how goes it now?' I asked him.