“I have just come from there. Nobody knew where the Duchess was; I could not get near her. But if you see her tell her that I am at her disposal, that I await her orders. Ah! Monsieur Victor Hugo, I would give my life for that woman and for that child!”
Odilon Barrot is the most honest and the most devoted man in the world, but he is the opposite of a man of action; one feels trouble and indecision in his words, in his look, in his whole person.
“Listen,” he goes on, “what must be done, what is urgent, is that the people should be made acquainted with these grave changes, the abdication and Regency. Promise me that you will proclaim them at your mairie, in the faubourg, and wherever you possibly can.”
“I promise.”
I go off, with M. Moreau, towards the Tuileries.
In the Rue Bellechasse are galloping horses. A squadron of dragoons flashes by and seems to be fleeing from a man with bare arms who is running behind them and brandishing a sword.
The Tuileries are still guarded by troops. The Mayor shows his sash and they let us pass. At the gate the concierge, to whom I make myself known, apprises us that the Duchess d’Orleans, accompanied by the Duke de Nemours, has just left the château with the Count de Paris, no doubt to go to the Chamber of Deputies. We have, therefore, no other course than to continue on our way.
At the entrance to the Carrousel Bridge bullets whistle by our ears. Insurgents in the Place du Carrousel are firing upon the court carriages leaving the stables. One of the coachmen has been killed on his box.
“It would be too stupid of us to stay here looking on and get ourselves killed,” says M. Ernest Moreau. “Let us cross the bridge.”
We skirt the Institute and the Quai de la Monnaie. At the Pont Neuf we pass a band of men armed with pikes, axes and rifles, headed by a drummer, and led by a man brandishing a sabre and wearing a long coat of the King’s livery. It is the coat of the coachman who has just been killed in the Rue Saint Thomas du Louvre.