The opposition to our progress came to an end. Mrs. Leare and old Mammy were helped back into the cart, and a man offered them some wine. They brought some also to Hermione. I pressed her to drink it, which she did to their good health, and giving back the glass placed in it a napoleon. "Do me the favor, messieurs," she said, "to drink your next toast to our American republic."
Cheers rose for her. There was no longer any talk of detaining us: the old horse was urged forward. Hermione took my arm. We marched on, escorted by the rabble. At the end of the village-street they all gave us an unsteady cheer and turned back to their wine-tables. Hermione proceeded in silence a little farther. Then I felt her slipping from my arm, and was just in time to catch her.
Without compunction I requested Mammy Chris to get out of the cart and put her young lady in her place, pillowing her head as carefully as I could on my own coat, and proceeding in my shirtsleeves.
We were then not half a mile from the Banlieu, which we passed without adventure, much to my surprise, its inhabitants having taken advantage of the confusion to pour into Paris and infest its richer quarters.
The ladies were obliged to get out at the barrier and to send back the cart to its proprietor. Again I had the happiness of supporting Hermione while I carried little Claribel, and Mrs. Leare and Mammy walked on ahead.
"I feel humiliated," I said, "that the whole burden of those dreadful moments should have fallen upon you."
"And to avoid that feeling you were ready to knock down a drunken blouse in English style?" she said, smiling. "No, Mr. Farquhar, nothing but the power that a woman finds in her own womanhood could have brought us through safely. Those men had all had mothers, and each man had some sort of womanly ideal. I could not have managed a crowd of poissardes, but, thank Heaven, there is yet a chord that a woman may strike in the hearts of men."
The dawn of Thursday, February 24, 1848, was breaking at the eastward when I arrived with Mrs. Leare, Hermione, the nurse and child at their own apartment. I went up stairs with them. All was cold and cheerless in the rooms. There were no servants. Mrs. Leare sat down; the old nurse bemoaned her rheumatism and her aching bones; Hermione, with the assistance of the concierge's wife, lighted a fire, made some tea and waited on her mother.
For several days afterward she was very ill. She knew nothing of passing events—of the king's flight, of the triumphal and victorious processions that passed up the Champs Élysées, of the sudden impossibility of procuring supplies of change, and of the consequent difficulty of paying household bills with billets de mille francs without gold or silver.
Each day I went several times to make inquiries, and twice I saw Mrs. Leare in bed, but Hermione was invisible.