الفصل الفصل 269 · A BURIAL; AN OCCASION TO BE BORN AGAIN

In the spring of 1832, although the cholera had been chilling all minds

for the last three months and had cast over their agitation an

indescribable and gloomy pacification, Paris had already long been ripe

for commotion. As we have said, the great city resembles a piece of

artillery; when it is loaded, it suffices for a spark to fall, and the

shot is discharged. In June, 1832, the spark was the death of General

Lamarque.

Lamarque was a man of renown and of action. He had had in succession,

under the Empire and under the Restoration, the sorts of bravery

requisite for the two epochs, the bravery of the battle-field and the

bravery of the tribune. He was as eloquent as he had been valiant; a

sword was discernible in his speech. Like Foy, his predecessor, after

upholding the command, he upheld liberty; he sat between the left and

the extreme left, beloved of the people because he accepted the chances

of the future, beloved of the populace because he had served the

Emperor well; he was, in company with Comtes Gérard and Drouet, one of

Napoleon’s marshals _in petto_. The treaties of 1815 removed him as a

personal offence. He hated Wellington with a downright hatred which

pleased the multitude; and, for seventeen years, he majestically

preserved the sadness of Waterloo, paying hardly any attention to

intervening events. In his death agony, at his last hour, he clasped to

his breast a sword which had been presented to him by the officers of

the Hundred Days. Napoleon had died uttering the word _army_, Lamarque

uttering the word _country_.

His death, which was expected, was dreaded by the people as a loss, and

by the government as an occasion. This death was an affliction. Like

everything that is bitter, affliction may turn to revolt. This is what

took place.

On the preceding evening, and on the morning of the 5th of June, the

day appointed for Lamarque’s burial, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which

the procession was to touch at, assumed a formidable aspect. This

tumultuous network of streets was filled with rumors. They armed

themselves as best they might. Joiners carried off door-weights of

their establishment “to break down doors.” One of them had made himself

a dagger of a stocking-weaver’s hook by breaking off the hook and

sharpening the stump. Another, who was in a fever “to attack,” slept

wholly dressed for three days. A carpenter named Lombier met a comrade,

who asked him: “Whither are you going?” “Eh! well, I have no weapons.”

“What then?” “I’m going to my timber-yard to get my compasses.” “What

for?” “I don’t know,” said Lombier. A certain Jacqueline, an

expeditious man, accosted some passing artisans: “Come here, you!” He

treated them to ten sous’ worth of wine and said: “Have you work?”

“No.” “Go to Filspierre, between the Barrière Charonne and the Barrière

Montreuil, and you will find work.” At Filspierre’s they found

cartridges and arms. Certain well-known leaders were going the rounds,

that is to say, running from one house to another, to collect their

men. At Barthélemy’s, near the Barrière du Trône, at Capel’s, near the

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.