Chapter 11: The Combat Finished, the Ordeal Begins

I did not know where to go.

On the afternoon of the 7th I determined to go back once more to 19, Rue Richelieu. Under the gateway some one seized my arm. It was Madame D. She was waiting for me.

“Do not go in,” she said to me.

“Am I discovered?”

“Yes.”

“And taken.”

“No.”

She added, —

“Come.”

We crossed the courtyard, and we went out by a backdoor into the Rue Fontaine Molière; we reached the square of the Palais Royal. The fiacres were standing there as usual. We got into the first we came to.

“Where are we to go?” asked the driver.

She looked at me.

I answered, —

“I do not know.”

“I know,” she said.

Women always know where Providence lies.

An hour later I was in safety.

From the 4th, every day which passed by consolidated the coup d’état. Our defeat was complete, and we felt ourselves abandoned. Paris was like a forest in which Louis Bonaparte was making a battue of the Representatives; the wild beast was hunting down the sportsmen. We heard the indistinct baying of Maupas behind us. We were compelled to disperse. The pursuit was energetic. We entered into the second phase of duty—the catastrophe accepted and submitted to. The vanquished became the proscribed. Each one of us had his own concluding adventures. Mine was what it should have been—exile; death having missed me. I am not going to relate it here, this book is not my biography, and I ought not to divert to myself any of the attention which it may excite. Besides, what concerns me personally is told in a narrative which is one of the testaments of exile.33