I began to undress; a sound of voices was heard; my door opened; and M. the Prefect of Police, accompanied by M. Nay,[417] appeared. He made a thousand apologies for the prolongation of my detention in custody at the police-station; he informed me that my friends, the Duc de Fitz-James and the Baron Hyde de Neuville, had been arrested like myself and that the Prefect's Offices were so full that they did not know where to put the persons who had to be examined by the justiciary.
"But," he added, "you shall come to me, monsieur le vicomte, and choose in my apartment whatever suits you best."
I thanked him and begged him to leave me in my hole; I was already quite charmed with it, like a monk with his cell. M. the Prefect declined my entreaties and I had to forsake my nest I saw again the rooms which I had not visited since the day when Bonaparte's Prefect of Police had sent for me to invite me to leave Paris. M. Gisquet and Madame Gisquet opened all their rooms for me, begging me to pick the one which I would like to sleep in. M. Nay offered to give up his to me. I was confused at so much politeness; I accepted a lonely little room which looked out on the garden and which was used, I think, by Mademoiselle Gisquet as a dressing-room; I was allowed to have my servant with me: he slept on a mattress outside my door, at the entrance of a narrow stair-case leading down to Madame Gisquet's large apartment Another stair-case led to the garden; but this one was forbidden me and, every evening, a sentry was placed at the foot against the railing which separates the garden from the quay. Madame Gisquet is the kindest woman in the world and Mademoiselle Gisquet is very pretty and an exceedingly good musician. I have every reason to be satisfied with the care shown me by my hosts; they seemed anxious to atone for the twelve hours of my first confinement.
The Disquiet family.
The day after my installation in Mademoiselle Gisquet's dressing-room, I rose quite pleased, as I remembered Anacreon's song on the toilet of a young Greek girl; I put my head to the window: I perceived a small, very green garden and a great wall concealed behind japanned varnish; to the right, at the back of the garden, offices in which one caught glimpses of agreeable police-clerks, like beautiful nymphs amid lilac-bushes; to the left, the quay along the Seine, the river and a corner of old Paris, in the parish of Saint-André-des-Arcs. The sound of Mademoiselle Gisquet's piano reached me with the voices of the police-spies calling for head-clerks to receive their reports.
How everything changes in this world! That little romantic English garden of the police was a ragged and queer-shaped strip of the French garden, with its closely-trimmed elms, of the mansion of the First President of Paris. This old garden, in 1580, occupied the site of that block of houses which stops the view to the north and west, and it stretched to the bank of the Seine. It was there that, after the day of the barricades, the Duc de Guise came to visit Achille de Harlay:
"He found the First President, who was walking in his garden, who was so little astonished at his coming, that he did not so much as deign to turn his head nor discontinue the walk which he had commenced, which having finished, and being at the end of his alley, he turned, and, in turning, he saw the Duc de Guise, who came to him; then that grave magistrate, raising his voice, said to him:
"'It is a great pity that the varlet should drive out the master; for the rest, my soul is God's, my heart the King's and my body is in the hands of the wicked: let them do with it what they please.'"
The Achille de Harlay who walks in that garden to-day is M. Vidocq[418], and the Duc de Guise is Coco Lacour; we have changed great men for great principles. How free we are now! How free was I especially at my window, watching that good gendarme standing sentry at the foot of my staircase and prepared to shoot me flying, if I had sprouted wings! There was no nightingale in my garden, but there were plenty of frisky, shameless, quarrelsome sparrows, which are to be found everywhere, in the country, in town, in palaces, in prisons, and which perch as gaily on the instrument of death as on a rose-bush: to one that can fly away, what matter earthly sufferings?
Madame de Chateaubriand obtained permission to see me. She had spent thirteen months, under the Terror, in the Rennes prisons, with my two sisters Lucile and Julie; her imagination, remaining under the impression, can no longer endure the idea of a prison. My poor wife had a violent attack of hysterics, on entering the Prefect's Offices, and this was an obligation the more which I owed to the juste-milieu. On the second day of my detention, the examining magistrate, the Sieur Desmortiers[419], arrived, accompanied by his clerk.
M. Guizot had obtained the appointment as attorney-general to the Royal Court at Rennes of one M. Hello[420], a writer and, consequently, an envious and irritable man, like all who spoil paper in a triumphing party.
M. Guizot's creature, finding my name and those of M. le Duc de Fitz-James and M. Hyde de Neuville mixed up in the proceedings that were being conducted against M. Berryer at Nantes, wrote to the Minister of Justice that, if he were the master, he would not fail to have us arrested and included in the trial, both as accomplices and as witnesses for the prosecution. M. de Montalivet had thought it his duty to yield to the advice of M. Hello: there was a time when M. de Montalivet used to come to me to ask my opinion and my ideas relating to the elections and the liberty of the press. The Restoration, which made M. de Montalivet a peer, was unable to make him a man of intelligence, and that is no doubt why it makes him "feel sick" to-day.