om, when she
suddenly came back to the counter, opened our drawer, seized us with no
very reverent hands, and, the next thing we knew, the whole twelve of
us were thrust into a trunk upstairs, and buried in Egyptian darkness.
From that moment all traces of what was occurring in the streets of
Paris were lost to us. After all, it is not so very disagreeable to be
only a pocket-handkerchief in a revolution.

{Les ordonnances = four decrees establishing absolute rule, issued by
King Charles X on July 25, 1830, which touched off the July Revolution,
leading to his abdication on July 31, and the installation of the Duke
of Orleans as Louis Philippe I, King of the French--Cooper was living
in Paris during this period, though he returned there from Italy and
Germany a few days after the July Revolution itself, and he was a close
friend of the Marquis de Lafayette who played a major part in the
Revolution and its aftermath; for Cooper and many others, the ultimate
results of the Revolution were a serious disappointment, since the new
King seemed rapidly to become almost as conservative as the old}

Our imprisonment lasted until the following December. As our feelings
had become excited on the questions of the day, as well as those of
other irrational beings around us, we might have passed a most
uncomfortable time in the trunk, but for one circumstance. So great had
been the hurry of our mistress in thus shutting us up, that we had been
crammed in in a way to leave it impossible to say which was the cote
droit, and which the cote gauche. Thus completely deranged as parties,
we took to discussing philosophical matters in general; an occupation
well adapted to a situation that required so great an exercise of
discretion.

One day, when we least expected so great a change, our mistress came in
person, searched several chests, trunks and drawers, and finally
discovered us where she had laid us, with her own hands, near four
months before. It seems that, in her hurry and fright, she had actually
forgotten in what nook we had been concealed. We were smoothed with
care, our political order reestablished, and then we were taken below
and restored to the dignity of the select circle in the drawer already
mentioned. This was like removing to a fashionable square, or living in
a beau quartier of a capital. It was even better than removing from
East Broadway into bona fide, real, unequaled, league-long, eighty feet
wide, Broadway!

{b