Left and the Committee, dogged, worried, hunted
down, always on the point of being discovered and taken, that is to
say--massacred; repaired for the purpose of deliberating, to
twenty-seven different houses, shifted twenty-seven times their place of
meeting, from their first gathering in the Rue Blanche to their last
conference at Raymond's. They refused the shelters which were offered
them on the left bank of the river, wishing always to remain in the
centre of the combat. During these changes they more than once traversed
the right bank of Paris from one end to the other, most of the time on
foot, and making long circuits in order not to be followed. Everything
threatened them with danger; their number, their well-known faces, even
their precautions. In the populous streets there was danger, the police
were permanently posted there; in the lonely streets there was danger,
because the goings and comings were more noticed there.

They did not sleep, they did not eat, they took what they could find, a
glass of water from time to time, a morsel of bread here and there.
Madame Landrin gave us a basin of soup, Madame Grevy the remainder of a
cold pie. We dined one evening on a little chocolate which a chemist had
distributed in a barricade. At Jeunesse's, in the Rue de Grammont,
during the night of the 3rd, Michel de Bourges took a chair, and said,
"This is my bed." Were they tired? They did not feel it. The old men,
like Ronjat, the sick, like Boysset, all went forward. The public peril,
like a fever, sustained them.

Our venerable colleague, Lamennais, did not come, but he remained three
days without going to bed, buttoned up in his old frock coat, his thick
boots on his feet, ready to march. He wrote to the author these three
lines, which it is impossible not to quote:--"You are heroes without me.
This pains me greatly. I await your orders. Try, then, to find me
something to do, be it but to die."

In these meetings each man preserved his usual demeanor. At times one
might have thought it an ordinary sitting in one of the bureaux of the
Assembly. There was the calm of every day, mingled with the firmness of
decisive crises. Edgar Quinet retained all his lofty judgment, Noel
Parfait all his mental vivacity, Yvan all his vigorous and intelligent
penetration, Labrousse all his animation. In a corner Pierre Lefranc,
pamphleteer and ballad-writer, but a pamphleteer like Courier, and a
ballad-writer like Beranger smiled at t