Les Misérables
Petit-Chapeau, the drinkers accosted each other with a grave air. They
were heard to say: “Have you your pistol?” “Under my blouse.” “And
you?” “Under my shirt.” In the Rue Traversière, in front of the Bland
workshop, and in the yard of the Maison-Brulée, in front of tool-maker
Bernier’s, groups whispered together. Among them was observed a certain
Mavot, who never remained more than a week in one shop, as the masters
always discharged him “because they were obliged to dispute with him
every day.” Mavot was killed on the following day at the barricade of
the Rue Ménilmontant. Pretot, who was destined to perish also in the
struggle, seconded Mavot, and to the question: “What is your object?”
he replied: _“Insurrection.”_ Workmen assembled at the corner of the
Rue de Bercy, waited for a certain Lemarin, the revolutionary agent for
the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. Watchwords were exchanged almost publicly.
On the 5th of June, accordingly, a day of mingled rain and sun, General
Lamarque’s funeral procession traversed Paris with official military
pomp, somewhat augmented through precaution. Two battalions, with
draped drums and reversed arms, ten thousand National Guards, with
their swords at their sides, escorted the coffin. The hearse was drawn
by young men. The officers of the Invalides came immediately behind it,
bearing laurel branches. Then came an innumerable, strange, agitated
multitude, the sectionaries of the Friends of the People, the Law
School, the Medical School, refugees of all nationalities, and Spanish,
Italian, German, and Polish flags, tricolored horizontal banners, every
possible sort of banner, children waving green boughs, stone-cutters
and carpenters who were on strike at the moment, printers who were
recognizable by their paper caps, marching two by two, three by three,
uttering cries, nearly all of them brandishing sticks, some brandishing
sabres, without order and yet with a single soul, now a tumultuous
rout, again a column. Squads chose themselves leaders; a man armed with
a pair of pistols in full view, seemed to pass the host in review, and
the files separated before him. On the side alleys of the boulevards,
in the branches of the trees, on balconies, in windows, on the roofs,
swarmed the heads of men, women, and children; all eyes were filled
with anxiety. An armed throng was passing, and a terrified throng
looked on.
The Government, on its side, was taking observations. It observed with
its hand on its sword. Four squadrons of carabineers could be seen in
the Place Louis XV. in their saddles, with their trumpets at their
head, cartridge-boxes filled and muskets loaded, all in readiness to
march; in the Latin country and at the Jardin des Plantes, the
Municipal Guard echelonned from street to street; at the
Halle-aux-Vins, a squadron of dragoons; at the Grève half of the 12th
Light Infantry, the other half being at the Bastille; the 6th Dragoons
at the Célestins; and the courtyard of the Louvre full of artillery.
The remainder of the troops were confined to their barracks, without
reckoning the regiments of the environs of Paris. Power being uneasy,
held suspended over the menacing multitude twenty-four thousand
soldiers in the city and thirty thousand in the banlieue.
Divers reports were in circulation in the cortège. Legitimist tricks
were hinted at; they spoke of the Duc de Reichstadt, whom God had
marked out for death at that very moment when the populace were
designating him for the Empire. One personage, whose name has remained
unknown, announced that at a given hour two overseers who had been won
over, would throw open the doors of a factory of arms to the people.
That which predominated on the uncovered brows of the majority of those
present was enthusiasm mingled with dejection. Here and there, also, in
that multitude given over to such violent but noble emotions, there
were visible genuine visages of criminals and ignoble mouths which
said: “Let us plunder!” There are certain agitations which stir up the
bottoms of marshes and make clouds of mud rise through the water. A
phenomenon to which “well drilled” policemen are no strangers.
The procession proceeded, with feverish slowness, from the house of the
deceased, by way of the boulevards as far as the Bastille. It rained
from time to time; the rain mattered nothing to that throng. Many
incidents, the coffin borne round the Vendome column, stones thrown at
the Duc de Fitz-James, who was seen on a balcony with his hat on his
head, the Gallic cock torn from a popular flag and dragged in the mire,
a policeman wounded with a blow from a sword at the Porte Saint-Martin,
an officer of the 12th Light Infantry saying aloud: “I am a
Republican,” the Polytechnic School coming up unexpectedly against
orders to remain at home, the shouts of: “Long live the Polytechnique!
Long live the Republic!” marked the passage of the funeral train. At
the Bastille, long files of curious and formidable people who descended
from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, effected a junction with the
procession, and a certain terrible seething began to agitate the
throng.
One man was heard to say to another: “Do you see that fellow with a red
beard, he’s the one who will give the word when we are to fire.” It
appears that this red beard was present, at another riot, the Quénisset
affair, entrusted with this same function.
The hearse passed the Bastille, traversed the small bridge, and reached
the esplanade of the bridge of Austerlitz. There it halted. The crowd,
surveyed at that moment with a bird’s-eye view, would have presented
the aspect of a comet whose head was on the esplanade and whose tail
spread out over the Quai Bourdon, covered the Bastille, and was
prolonged on the boulevard as far as the Porte Saint-Martin. A circle
was traced around the hearse. The vast rout held their peace. Lafayette
spoke and bade Lamarque farewell. This was a touching and august
instant, all heads uncovered, all hearts beat high.
All at once, a man on horseback, clad in black, made his appearance in
the middle of the group with a red flag, others say, with a pike
surmounted with a red liberty-cap. Lafayette turned aside his head.
Exelmans quitted the procession.
This red flag raised a storm, and disappeared in the midst of it. From
the Boulevard Bourdon to the bridge of Austerlitz one of those clamors
which resemble billows stirred the multitude. Two prodigious shouts
went up: “Lamarque to the Pantheon!—Lafayette to the Town-hall!” Some
young men, amid the declamations of the throng, harnessed themselves
and began to drag Lamarque in the hearse across the bridge of
Austerlitz and Lafayette in a hackney-coach along the Quai Morland.
In the crowd which surrounded and cheered Lafayette, it was noticed
that a German showed himself named Ludwig Snyder, who died a
centenarian afterwards, who had also been in the war of 1776, and who
had fought at Trenton under Washington, and at Brandywine under
Lafayette.
In the meantime, the municipal cavalry on the left bank had been set in
motion, and came to bar the bridge, on the right bank the dragoons
emerged from the Célestins and deployed along the Quai Morland. The men
who were dragging Lafayette suddenly caught sight of them at the corner
of the quay and shouted: “The dragoons!” The dragoons advanced at a
walk, in silence, with their pistols in their holsters, their swords in
their scabbards, their guns slung in their leather sockets, with an air
of gloomy expectation.
They halted two hundred paces from the little bridge. The carriage in
which sat Lafayette advanced to them, their ranks opened and allowed it
to pass, and then closed behind it. At that moment the dragoons and the
crowd touched. The women fled in terror. What took place during that
fatal minute? No one can say. It is the dark moment when two clouds
come together. Some declare that a blast of trumpets sounding the
charge was heard in the direction of the Arsenal, others that a blow
from a dagger was given by a child to a dragoon. The fact is, that
three shots were suddenly discharged: the first killed Cholet, chief of
the squadron, the second killed an old deaf woman who was in the act of
closing her window, the third singed the shoulder of an officer; a
woman screamed: “They are beginning too soon!” and all at once, a
squadron of dragoons which had remained in the barracks up to this
time, was seen to debouch at a gallop with bared swords, through the
Rue Bassompierre and the Boulevard Bourdon, sweeping all before them.
Then all is said, the tempest is loosed, stones rain down, a fusillade
breaks forth, many precipitate themselves to the bottom of the bank,
and pass the small arm of the Seine, now filled in, the timber-yards of
the Isle Louviers, that vast citadel ready to hand, bristle with
combatants, stakes are torn up, pistol-shots fired, a barricade begun,
the young men who are thrust back pass the Austerlitz bridge with the
hearse at a run, and the municipal guard, the carabineers rush up, the
dragoons ply their swords, the crowd disperses in all directions, a
rumor of war flies to all four quarters of Paris, men shout: “To arms!”
they run, tumble down, flee, resist. Wrath spreads abroad the riot as
wind spreads a fire.
CHAPTER IV—THE EBULLITIONS OF FORMER DAYS
Nothing is more extraordinary than the first breaking out of a riot.
Everything bursts forth everywhere at once. Was it foreseen? Yes. Was
it prepared? No. Whence comes it? From the pavements. Whence falls it?
From the clouds. Here insurrection assumes the character of a plot;
there of an improvisation. The first comer seizes a current of the
throng and leads it whither he wills. A beginning full of terror, in
which is mingled a sort of formidable gayety. First come clamors, the
shops are closed, the displays of the merchants disappear; then come
isolated shots; people flee; blows from gun-stocks beat against
portes-cochères, servants can be heard laughing in the courtyards of
houses and saying: “There’s going to be a row!”
A quarter of an hour had not elapsed when this is what was taking place
at twenty different spots in Paris at once.
In the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, twenty young men, bearded
and with long hair, entered a dram-shop and emerged a moment later,
carrying a horizontal tricolored flag covered with crape, and having at
their head three men armed, one with a sword, one with a gun, and the
third with a pike.
In the Rue des Nonaindières, a very well-dressed bourgeois, who had a
prominent belly, a sonorous voice, a bald head, a lofty brow, a black
beard, and one of these stiff moustaches which will not lie flat,
offered cartridges publicly to passers-by.
In the Rue Saint-Pierre-Montmartre, men with bare arms carried about a
black flag, on which could be read in white letters this inscription:
“Republic or Death!” In the Rue des Jeûneurs, Rue du Cadran, Rue
Montorgueil, Rue Mandar, groups appeared waving flags on which could be
distinguished in gold letters, the word _section_ with a number. One of
these flags was red and blue with an almost imperceptible stripe of
white between.
They pillaged a factory of small-arms on the Boulevard Saint-Martin,
and three armorers’ shops, the first in the Rue Beaubourg, the second
in the Rue Michel-le-Comte, the other in the Rue du Temple. In a few
minutes, the thousand hands of the crowd had seized and carried off two
hundred and thirty guns, nearly all double-barrelled, sixty-four
swords, and eighty-three pistols. In order to provide more arms, one
man took the gun, the other the bayonet.
Opposite the Quai de la Grève, young men armed with muskets installed
themselves in the houses of some women for the purpose of firing. One
of them had a flint-lock. They rang, entered, and set about making