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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 Gerard 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 Barriere
Charonne and the Barriere 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 Barthelemy's, near
the Barriere du Trone, 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 Traversiere, in front of the Bland workshop, and
in the yard of the Maison-Brulee, 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 Menilmontant. 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 Greve half of the 12th Light Infantry, the other half being
at the Bastille; the 6th Dragoons at the Celestins; 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 cortege.
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 Quenisset 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'seye 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 Celestins 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.
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