Who can help being carried away by the enthusiasm of a crowd? I am not
a political man, I am only an observer who sees, hears, and feels.
I was on the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville at the moment when the names of
the successful candidates were proclaimed, and the emotion is still
fresh upon me.[25] There were perhaps a hundred thousand men there,
assembled from all quarters of the city. The neighbouring streets were
also full, and the bayonets glittering in the sun filled the Place with
brilliant flashes like miniature lightning. In the centre of the façade
of the building a platform was erected, over which presided a statue of
the Republic, wearing a Phrygian cap. The bronze basso-relievo of Henry
IV. had been carefully hidden with clusters of flags. Each window was
alive with faces. I saw several women on the roof, and the _gamins_
were everywhere, hanging on to the sculptured ornaments, or riding
fearlessly on the shoulders of the marble busts. One by one the
battalions had taken up their position on the Place with their bands.
When they were all assembled they struck up the Marseillaise, which was
re-echoed by a thousand voices. It was grand in the extreme, and the
magnificent hymn, which late defeats had shorn of its glory, swelled
forth again with all its old splendour revived. Suddenly the cannon is
heard, the voices rise louder and louder; a sea of standards, bayonets,
and human heads waves backwards and forwards in front of the platform.
The cannon roars, but we only hear it between the intervals of the
hymn. Then all the sounds are confounded in one universal shout, that
shout of the vast multitude which seems to have but one heart and one
voice. The members of the Committee, each with a tricolor scarf across
his breast, have taken their places on the platform. One of them reads
out the names of the elected councillors. Then the cannon roars once
more, but is almost drowned by the deafening huzzas of the crowd. Oh!
people of Paris, who on the day of the “_Crosse en l’air_”[26] got
tipsy in the wine-shops of Montmartre, whose ranks furnished the
murderers of Thomas and Lecomte, who in the Rue de la Paix shot down
unconscious passengers, who are capable of the wildest extravagance and
most execrable deeds, you are also in your days of glory, grand and
magnificent, when a volcano of generous passions rages within, and the
hearts even of those who condemn you most, are scorched in the flames.