opened, and we passed a gloomy time of uncertainty and conjecture.
There were ominous sounds in the streets. Some of us thought we heard
the roar of distant artillery. At length the master and mistress appeared
by themselves in the shop; money and papers were secured, and the
female was just retiring to an inner room, 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,