the land that Lafayette went to save, that I wanted my dinner, and would
like to get out. I walked down near enough to the gate to see the
policeman, but my courage failed. Before I could stammer out half that
explanation to him in his trifling language (which foreigners are
mockingly told is the best in the world for conversation), he would
either have slipped his hateful rapier through my body, or have raised an
alarm and called out the guards of the palace to hunt me down like a
rabbit.

A man in the Tuileries Garden at night! an assassin! a conspirator! one
of the Carbonari, perhaps a dozen of them--who knows?--Orsini bombs,
gunpowder, Greek-fire, Polish refugees, murder, emeutes, REVOLUTION!

No, I'm not going to speak to that person in the cocked hat and
dress-coat under these circumstances. Conversation with him out of the
best phrase-books would be uninteresting. Diplomatic row between the two
countries would be the least dreaded result of it. A suspected
conspirator against the life of Napoleon, without a chance for
explanation, I saw myself clubbed, gagged, bound, searched (my minute
notes of the Tuileries confiscated), and trundled off to the
Conciergerie, and hung up to the ceiling in an iron cage there, like
Ravaillac.

I drew back into the shade and rapidly walked to the western gate. It was
closed, of course. On the gate-piers stand the winged steeds of Marly,
never less admired than by me at that moment. They interested me less
than a group of the Corps d'Afrique, who lounged outside, guarding the
entrance from the square, and unsuspicious that any assassin was trying
to get out. I could see the gleam of the lamps on their bayonets and hear
their soft tread. Ask them to let me out? How nimbly they would have