It was a hot August night, and we worked and packed all through it, making Eustace lie down and rest, though sleep was impossible, and he said he wanted to see Meg and his mother as long as he could.  As to Clement, we were afraid of the servants noticing him, so Eustace had locked him up in his own room, but he slept as little as any of us, and when his breakfast was brought him, he had never touched his supper.  Certainly mine was the saddest bridegroom who ever stole away to be married; but I could forgive him.  Did I not know what it was to be an exile, with one’s heart torn for one’s country’s disgrace?

The difficulty was to get rid of the real Jacques Pierrot, but he gave us a little assistance in that way by coming crying to M. le Baron, to ask permission to take leave of his mother in the Faubourg St. Denis.  This was readily granted to him, with strong insistence that he should be back by eleven o’clock, whereas we intended to start as soon as the gates were opened, namely, at six.  Eustace had some time before purchased four mules and a carriage.  He was not fit to ride in bad weather, and for me to have made a journey on horseback would have attracted too much attention, but the times were too uncertain for us to trust to posting, and mules, though slower than horses, would go on longer without resting, and were less likely to be seized by any army.  I would take no maid-servant, as she would only have added to our dangers.

We ate our hearts till seven, when we succeeded in getting the mules to the door, and haste softened the parting for the moment.  Indeed, Eustace and Meg had said much to each other in the course of the night.  We had both knelt to ask my mother’s forgiveness for having so often crossed her, and she finally wept and fainted, so that Meg was wholly occupied in attending to her.

Clement stood by the carriage, looking his part so well that my first impression was ‘that stupid Jacques has come back after all.’  Our anxiety now was to be entirely out of reach before the fellow came back, and hard was it to brook the long delay at the Porte St. Denis ere the officials deigned to look at us and our passes.  However, my brother had gone through too many gates no to know that silver and an air of indifference will smooth the way, so we came through at last without our valet having been especially scanned.

Beyond the gates the sight was sad enough, the houses in the suburbs with broken windows and doors as though pillaged, the gardens devastated, the trees cut down, and the fields, which ought to have been ripening to harvest, trampled or mown for forage, all looking as if a hostile invader had been there, and yet it was the sons of the country that had done this, while swarms of starving people pursued us begging.  Alas! had we not seen such a sight at home?  We knew what it must be to Clement, but as he sat by the driver we durst not say a word of comfort to him.