Jean Marot found Mlle. Fouchette interesting but incomprehensible.
Jean believed himself to be a sincere and true republican,--and he
was, in fact, quite as logical in this as were many of the so-called
republicans of the French Parliament, who, like their familiar
political prototypes in the United States, talked one way and voted
another. He had participated in the street disturbances as a protest
against the Ministry and for the pure love of excitement, not against
the republic.
As to the Dreyfus case, he had been satisfied, with most of his
countrymen, upon the statement of five successive ministers of war.
After all, in a country where so many have always stood ready to sell
their national liberty for the gold of the stranger, it came easy to
believe in one Judas more.
The United States has had but one Benedict Arnold; France counts her
traitors by the thousands. They spring from every rank and are
incidental to every age. The word Treachery is the most important word
in French domestic history.
And when honest men doubted the justice of a council of war, they were
silenced by the specious reasoning of men like M. de Beauchamp. Had
Jean been invited to assist in overturning the republic and to put
Philippe d'Orléans on the throne, he would have revolted. His
political ideals would have been outraged. Yet every act committed by
him and by his blind partisans tended directly, and were secretly
engineered by others, to that end.
Jean Marot in this was but a fair type of tens of thousands of his
intelligent but headstrong and misguided countrymen.
"In the street!"
Once in the street the following day, Jean forgot his serious
reflections of the previous night. It was Sunday, the chosen day of
battle by sea and land,--a day consecrated to violence and bloodshed
by the Paris mob. The students gathered at the divided rendezvous of
the Place Panthéon and the Place de l'Odéon. Many of them wore the
white boutonniére of the Jeunesse Royalistes, the tricolor, the red
rose of communism, or other badge of particular political belief, and
all carried canes, some of which were loaded and some of the sword
variety. Their leaders excitedly harangued them while the heavy squads
of police agents distributed in the vicinity watched the proceedings
without interference.
Indeed, the royalists and their allies had abundant reason to believe
the police force of Paris, officers and men, civil and military, in
sympathy with their movement against the republic. Not one of the many
street disturbances of the year past had been the spontaneous outburst
of popular anger that is the forerunner of revolution. On every
occasion they had been, as they were in this instance, the publicly
prearranged breaches of the peace in which the worst elements of the
Paris world were invited or hired to join. This was well known to the
government. It would have been easy and perfectly legal and wise to
have anticipated them by governmental authority. Acting under that
authority, a score or two of police agents could have dispersed all
preliminary gatherings. Under the eye of such a police force as we
have in New York any one of the numerous riots which disgraced the
streets of Paris during the pendency of the "Affaire" would have been
impossible.
The police of Paris, however, are French,--which is to say that they
are incapable of seeing their duty from a strictly impersonal point of
view, but are lax to the utmost indifference and partiality or brutal
to the extreme of cruelty and fiendishness.
But perhaps the severest censure of the Paris police agent lies in the
fact that no just magistrate accepts his unsupported testimony, and
that at least two-thirds of his riot arrests are nullified at once by
setting the victims at liberty. As the police agent is the creature of
the general government and is not responsible to the municipality, he
can only be brought to book when he makes the mistake of offending
some high personage. To the complaint of an ordinary citizen he would
probably reply by drawing his cloak around him and expectorating
viciously.
"Qu'est-ce que ça me fiche?"
The students assembled at the Place du Panthéon easily avoided the
shadowy blue barrier drawn up across the Rue Soufflot. They howled a
good deal in unison, then suddenly disappeared down Rue Cujas, and,
pouring into Boulevard St. Michel, joined forces at the foot of Rue
Racine with their comrades from the Place de l'Odéon. Like all student
manifestations of any sort, the procession made a great noise, sticks
were brandished, and the air rent with cries of "Vive l'armée! À bas
les traitres!"
The peaceful shopkeepers came to their doors and regarded the young
men indulgently. "Ah! la jeunesse n'a q'un temps!"
Some four hundred young men from the great schools were joined at the
Place St. Michel by numerous hoodlums and roughs from the purlieus of
Rue St. Severin, Place Maubert, and the equally delectable region of
Rue de la Hutchette. These patriot soldiers of fortune "émeuted" for
the low rate of forty sous per day, and were mostly armed with
bludgeons, wherewith to earn their meagre salary. It mattered little
whom they served, though it was just now the noble Duc d'Orléans.
The police saw this addition with a knowing eye. They barred the
entrance to the Pont St. Michel. It was a half-hearted effort, and
with cries of "Vive la liberté!" "En avant!" the mob of young men
swept the thin files out of the way and gained the bridge. Not,
however, without some kicks and blows, broken canes, and bleeding
faces. A lusty gold-laced brigadier rolled in the dust, desperately
clinging to two coat-collars, and won the coveted cross by allowing
himself to be kicked and stamped almost out of human resemblance by
the infuriated mob of rescuers.
By this time the head of the mob had reached the other end of the
bridge, where a double barrier of agents was drawn up across the
street. A gray-haired commissaire of long and distinguished police
service walked calmly forward alone to meet them. His resolute step,
his pose, bespoke his dignity and courage. He raised his left hand
with the air of authority accustomed to being obeyed.
His keen eyes at once sought and found and held the eyes of the
leaders.
"You must go back,--you cannot cross here,--you must disperse----"
"Sacré!" growled the crowd, moving forward threateningly. "We have a
right to cross anywhere! We are citizens of Paris and have the rights
of any other citizen,--the same as you, Monsieur le Commissaire!"
A dozen such protests on the instant. But the wily veteran was ready.
He knew that when a mob stops to parley the battle is half won.
"Oh, yes, messieurs,--singly, or as other good citizens, you are
right; but not as----"
A young man reached over his comrades' shoulders and struck the old
commissaire in the face with his cane.
"For shame!" cried Jean Marot, indignantly. "What foolishness!" And he
broke the cane across his knee and threw the fragments to the ground.
In the same moment the old commissaire dashed into the crowd and
single-handed dragged his youthful assailant to the front and clear of
his companions.
"The guard! the guard! Look out, comrades! here comes the guard!"
The cry ran along the line and through the ranks hushed by the wanton
blow delivered unnecessarily upon a respected official. A company of
the Garde Républicaine à pied had filed out across the Boulevard du
Palais from behind the Préfecture; another company à cheval debouched
into the quai from the other corner, and now rode slowly down towards
the bridge.
"Bayonets in front and sabres on the flank!" said Jean to those around
him. "It were wise to get out of this."
"Good advice, young man,--get out! It won't do, you see. You must
cross singly, or as other citizens. Never mind your hot-headed young
friend," added the old man, kindly, as he wiped the blood from his
face. "We won't be hard on him. Only, you must go back at once!"
He talked to them as if they were little children. But they needed no
further urging. The rear-guard had already turned tail at the sight of
the troops and were in full retreat. Before the last man had cleared
the bridge the only one who had been arrested was set at liberty,
though he had richly earned six months in jail.
And thus terminated the harebrained attempt to march five hundred
riotous men through the city directly in front of the Préfecture,
where lay unlimited reserves, civil and military, under arms. The
royalists had somewhat overstrained the complaisance of the
authorities.
Acting at once on the hint of the police official, the crowd broke up
into small groups. "À la Concorde! À la Concorde! Concorde!" they
cried.
This revolutionary rendezvous was prearranged to mean Place du
Carrousel, conditional on police interference. It was to deceive the
authorities, the main object being to form a junction with the
anticipated hordes from Montmartre and La Villette.
But a mob broken into scattered groups is no longer a mob, and being
no longer a mob, there is no longer courage or cohesion of purpose.
Instead of some four hundred students and about a hundred roughs, not
more than fifty of the former responded at the foot of the Gambetta
monument, while the latter class had gathered strength by the way.
This discrepancy, though painfully apparent to Jean Marot and his
friends, in no wise dampened their ardor. Their chosen speakers lashed
them into fresh furors of patriotism while they waited. The eloquent
young man who quoted the words of Gambetta engraved on his monument
wrung tears from his sympathetic auditors. These words of wisdom and
patriotism had no pertinence whatever to the work in hand,--which was
to break up a meeting organized by some distinguished philanthropists,
scholars, and their friends in the interests of civil liberty and the
perpetuity of human rights,--but everything serves as fuel to a flame
well started.
Carried away by the spirit of exaltation, Jean Marot clambered upon
the monument itself, and ascending the heroic figure of Gambetta amid
the wild plaudits of the mob, kissed the mute stone lips. His hat had
fallen to the ground, and now the hysterical crowd tore it into bits
and scrambled for the pieces, which they pinned on their breasts as
precious souvenirs of the occasion.
When Jean reached the earth it was to be frantically embraced on every
side. A great, broad-shouldered, big-bearded man in a cap and the
blouse of the artisan crowned this exciting ceremony by kissing the
young student full on the mouth.
A score of hats were tendered, but Jean accepted the cap of the
stalwart workman, who immediately brandished his club and shouted "En
avant!" He unwound his soiled red sash as he started, and, making it
deftly into a sort of turban, constituted himself Jean's special
body-guard for the day.
The strong force of police posted in the neighborhood of the Louvre
had regarded this street drama with stoical indifference. When the
noisy crowd surged into the Rue de Rivoli it passed between the
mounted videttes of the Garde Républicaine. Farther on, in the Rue St.
Honoré, a squad of dismounted cuirassiers stood listlessly holding the
bridles of their horses. The afternoon sun flashed electric rays from
the plates of burnished steel.
"Vive l'armée!" burst from the mob.
A subaltern on the curb touched his glittering casque in military
salute without stirring a muscle of his armored body.
Now recognized leader, Jean directed the march up the narrow Rue de
Richelieu, observing to his bearded aide that it was more direct and
safe, though shouts of "Avenue de l'Opéra! l'Opéra!" rose from his
followers. Jean paid no attention to these cries.
"You are right, my boy!" said the man in the blouse, patting Jean on
the shoulder approvingly. "The broad streets are to the agents and
military. The cuirassiers can there trample men like flies! Ah! with a
regiment of cavalry and a battery of three quick-firers one could hold
Paris at the Place de l'Opéra against the world!"
"Yes, my friend," answered Jean, with a smile, "always provided the
world agreed not to drop thousand-pound melinite shells on one from
Mont Valérien or Montmartre, or from some other place."
"Yes, yes, yes,--you are right, my boy," admitted the other. "En
avant!"
This man had the voice of a Stentor. He was also a Hercules of
strength. Here and there the narrow street seemed blocked with
vehicles; but when he did not terrorize the drivers into immediate
flight at the sound of his voice and the sight of his club he would
calmly lift the encumbrance and set it to one side.
"En avant!" he would then roar.
Where possible, however, all vehicles promptly fled the street save
the omnibuses. From the imperiale of one of these came the cry,--
"Vive la république!"
"Vive l'armée!" yelled the mob.
"Vive la république!" came the response.
A dash was made for the omnibus. While four or five men held the
horses a dozen or more clambered over the wheels and up the narrow
steps behind. There were sixteen persons on top, seven of whom were
women. The latter shrieked. Two fainted away. The assailants sprang
upon the men and demanded the one who had dared to consider the health
of the republic without the army. No one could or would point him out.
On the apparently well established French principle that it is better
that ten innocent should suffer punishment rather than that one guilty
person should escape the patriotic young men assaulted everybody. A
white-haired old man who protested was slapped in the face, another
man was quieted by a brutal kick in the abdomen that doubled him up,
a couple of foreigners who could neither understand the language nor
comprehend what it was all about were roughly handled, a half-grown
boy was cuffed,--everybody but the driver came in for blows and
insults; and this driver of the omnibus was in all probability the
real villain.
"En avant!"
This lesson was administered en route, and without stopping the main
body of manifestants pressed on into the grand boulevard, to be
swallowed up in the resistless human current that now flowed down upon
the Place de l'Opéra.