WE left off telling you how Philarete was seized by the police officers one Sunday morning at his master's printing office, whither he had gone to fetch a book. He goes on to say: "The gentlemen who conducted me were as polished

as men could be. To that cat-like or tigerish pleasantry which distinguishes those professions which exist on human suffering, there was added, I think, in my case, some commiseration for my age, and for the simplicity of my questions. As we were crossing Pont Neuf they tried to reassure and console me. The women, who instinctively guess every trouble, regarded me with looks of pity. To my inquiries my attendants replied that it was merely a matter of form, that I should soon be restored to my family, that the accident which had led me to the house of a printer, supected of political crime, was not a sufficient cause of suspicion, still less of detention. In fact they allowed me to believe that I should see my poor mother again in the course of the evening. Thus I entered the police office without fear. I ascended several stairs, my attendants left me, and I was pushed forward by the shoulders by others, until I found myself in an oblong room, the smell of which almost suffocated me.

My education had been tender and delicate to excess,the enthusiasm of my father, and the lessons of my mother, in the peaceful solitude of our home, had left no space for vice-I knew nothing of Paris; I was accustomed only to a simple, innocent, and elegant life. I cast my eyes around me. I beheld men half naked; women in rags, with bloated complexions and bloodshot eyes; peasants in blouses, sitting with arms folded, or lying on the ground-some smoking, others playing with greasy cards; an atmosphere infected and revolting; a camp bed, in which lay side by side misery, intemperance, vice, wretchedness, crime. It was to this place that a policy blind and cruel, alike under the

Republic or the Monarchy, a Briareus which crushed every thing in its path, without pity and without remorse, had conducted my youth.

I burst into tears! I went and sat in a corner of a window; the thieves slang did not allow me to understand what they said; the foul laugh of crime, the gestures of debauchery, the effeminate ferocity, the special characteristics of vice in large cities, struck my tearful eyes. There I passed the night. The next morning the gaoler distributed slices of black bread to the inhabitants of the room. I begged permission to write to my mother,-to my mother, I said—suffering, ill, the most tender of mothers, who knew not what had become of me. This was refused me.

Three days passed thus! the sad thought of my mother, the anxiety, the impossibility of communicating with any one outside the prison, threw me into a fever. The gaoler at last obtained permission for me to write. I wrote two letters, the one to my mother, and the other to the Prefect of Police, both sent unsealed, according to the custom of these places; and in the evening I received a message from my mother, and a ring which I have never since parted with. The next day at eleven o'clock my name was called at the grate of the wicket. I was to be examined. The man who distributed bread and water to the anxious prisoners (of whom I made one), confided me to two gendarmes. From corridors half lighted to corridors perfectly dark; from staircase to staircase; from one winding passage to another; we arrived at last at an office on the ground floor. I heard a cry, my mother had left her bed, and obtained permission to

embrace me for a moment as I passed; her embrace was silent; she looked at me, and her look told me how I was changed; her paleness and her tears gave me a convulsion which I cannot describe. For a long time my mother's life had been despaired of by her physicians; her heart was attacked; Covisart, a French physician, could only prolong her life by constant watching; he said that any violent emotion would kill her." Chasles speaks of his mother with intense love-"shattered by the political tempests of our times, married first to an ardent Royalist, then to an ardent Republican, she had seen her first husband perish on the scaffold, with whom, after being married only a month, she, a girl of eighteen years and beautiful as an angel, had passed the honeymoon of their marriage in the dungeons of Sedan.

The indulgence of the police permitted my mother to embrace me, no more! One ordered my mother to retire, another carried her away.

Before a desk covered with papers, carefully classed and numbered, sat a man, whose name I never asked. His was

a short square figure, with the look of an Inquisitor. I remained standing before this man, who thus commenced his interrogatories:

M (said he abruptly), you form part of a generation to be stifled a race of vipers! France will never have peace till they are crushed.

[In politics, all who do not think with the party in power are vipers! In 1793, it was the defenders of Louis the Sixteenth who were vipers; in 1799, the friends of Carnot; in 1805, the partisans of the Bourbons; in 1815, the believers in Liberty !]

I was surprised at these words, and rousing up all the power of reasoning that I possessed, I replied-with childish pride and dignity—‘But, sir, I thought you were here to question me as to facts; I hear nothing but insults.'

The little man, whom my torn and soiled dress, my youth, my pitiful appearance altogether, had encouraged to affront, bounded in his black leather arm chair like a tiger taken in a snare, and rising in all his littleness, resting his clenched fists on the desk, he cried out—'What! you wish to teach me my business, do you? You will give me advice, sir!'

I content myself with reminding you (said I coolly) that you have to do, not with a guilty person, or even one committed for trial, but with an innocent young man, who knows not why he is here, by what right he has been brought hither, nor on what pretence he is detained.

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'That's it,' continued the examiner, who was now reseated, you make a fine speaker; you belong, it is easily seen, to the liberal youth. Clerk, write down all that the gentleman says.'" The prisoner was then interrogated sharply, and he says that the coolness of his answers, and the impossibility of extracting anything against him as to his knowledge of conspiracies, made the Commissioner of Police more and more angry. He opened the confiscated portfolio, commented on some verses written as to William Tell, questioned him as to his secret intentions, his ideas, his theories, and then, when all failed in inculpating the prisoner, demanded of him "If he loved the reigning Dynasty ?”

"I was silent for a moment," says M. Chasles, "and then said to him with an emphatic firmness, which I explain now