on for support. I assured her that we should consider it as the greatest honour to be allowed to sacrifice our lives and property for the restoration of the elder branch of the Bourbons. "And do yon know," added the lady, "that this is the day when Henry V., as Duke of Bordeaux, took his first communion!" "What an important day for the friends of the throne and the altar," I replied; "a holy day, deserving to be sung by Lamartine!"
The night, however, of this fine day deserves to be marked blood-red in the calendar of France, and rumours relative to it were the next morning the talk of all Paris. Contradictions of the strangest kind were in circulation, and there is still a mysterious veil over all the history of the conspiracy. It was said that it had been intended to murder all the royal family with the large assembly which had been present in the Tuileries. The concierge of the Tuileries had been won over, and persuaded to admit the conspirators through the great gallery directly to the ball-room; some one had shot at the King but missed his mark; hundreds had been arrested; and so forth, and so on. Even in the afternoon I found before the garden-side of the Tuileries a great crowd gaping and gazing up at the windows, as if trying to see the shot which had been fired there. One man told how Périer had the night before ridden to
