Explore "Sir Percy Hits Back" by Emma Orczy on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The Moniteur does not say much about what happened afterwards. "La foule attendit avec assez de patience," is all it says, "mais personne ne vint."
The portals of the Hôtel de Ville which should have been a frame for the entrance of the principal actors in the last act of the drama, showed nothing but the yawning black emptiness beyond. The crowd waited, says the Moniteur, with sufficient patience. They did wait quite happily for ten minutes, agitatedly for twenty. But nobody came. Citizens Pochart and Danou, also Citizen Tartine, the butcher, and three or four others, were seen to make their way back across the Place, to run quickly up the steps of the Hôtel de Ville and subsequently disappear inside its portals. Still the crowd waited, very much as a crowd will wait in a theatre when the entr'acte is too long; some of them hilariously, others with impatient yawns, others again with tapping of feet and presently with murmurs of: "La Lan- terne! La Lan-terne!"