pocket a delicately scented pocket-handkerchief, with which he wiped his
brow. "If I get excited now, what will it be when they begin--to bite?"

All this while the orators were shouting their loudest, and the voices
dispersed throughout the crowd raised at intervals their short, sharp
cry of--

"Long live the King!"

And the police? There were only two agents attached to the immediate
neighbourhood, and they were smoking cigars and drinking absinthe in two
separate cellars, with the door locked on the outside. They were
prisoners of war of the most resigned type. The room in which stood the
Citizen Morot was dark, and wisely so. For the Parisian street
politician can make very pretty practice of a lighted petroleum-lamp
with an empty bottle or half a brick. The window was wide open, and the
wooden shutters were hooked back.

The attitude of the man was interested and slightly self-satisfied. It
suggested that of the manager of a theatre looking down from an
upper-tier box upon a full house and a faultless stage. At the same time
he was keeping what sailors call a very "bright look-out" towards either
end of the street. From his elevated position he was able to see over
the barricades, and he watched with intense interest the movements of
two women (or perhaps men disguised as such) who stood in the centre of
the street just beyond each obstruction.

There was something dramatic in the motionless attitude of these two
women, standing guard alone in the deserted street, on the wrong side of
the barricades.