'For my part,' said Captain Garbas, 'nothing very extraordinary has happened to me since I was shot.'

A loud shout of astonishment, multiplied by twenty different cries, was the answer to these few words.

We were there, in fact, twenty, grouped round a gigantic bowl of punch, in the court-yard of the mayoralty house of the first ward: artists, writers, men of the world, national guards, troops of the line, thrown together by the sad chances of civil war, during that night of the twenty-third of June, 1848, which preceded the most bloody of the four bloody days. Thanks to that mobility of the French nature, which likes to jest with serious things, and to take in earnest those that are ludicrous, every one of us attempted to introduce a joke, a story, a recollection, in the midst of the general preoccupation. As there was a possibility of being killed the day after, it even seemed good taste to laugh a little; for you know France is the country where, next to the merit of being brave, they like most to add the pleasure of appearing so.

Then we had ordered a lake of punch, held with great trouble in a regiment pot, which could well have been used as a foot-tub by the elephant of the zoological gardens. Those small bluish and whimsical flames, flickering like night-fires on that dark and boiling surface, were very much like the wild ideas of the moment, floating over the calamitous reality. We had all more or less tried to find at the bottom of our glasses forgetfulness of the cares of the day before, and the dangers of the morrow: a journalist had cracked a few jokes, a tourist had related an anecdote of his travels, a sportsman had narrated one of his last adventures, a painter had told some charge* of his studio. In short, most of us had paid their stakes of voluntary or

VOL. LVI.

*The word 'charge' means ludicrous anecdote.

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