“Ah! my friend,” continued Lamartine, “how heavy is this revolutionary
power to bear! One has to assume such weighty and such sudden
responsibilities before one’s conscience and in presence of history! I
do not know how I have been living during the past ten days. Yesterday I
had a few grey hairs; to-morrow they will be white.”
“Yes, but you are doing your duty as a man of genius grandly,” I
commented.
In a few minutes M. Armand Marrast returned.
“It was not against us,” he said. “How the lamentable affray came about
could not be explained to me. There was a collision, the rifles went
off, why? Was it a misunderstanding, was it a quarrel between Socialists
and Republicans? No one knows.”
“Are there any wounded?”
“Yes, and dead, too.”
A gloomy silence followed. I rose. “You have no doubt some measures to
take?” I said.
“What measures?” answered Lamartine. “This morning we resolved to decree
what you have already been able to do on a small scale in your quarter:
the organization of the citizen’s National Guard--every Frenchman a
soldier as well as a voter. But time is required, and meanwhile--”
he pointed to the waves and eddies of heads surging on the square
outside--“look, it is the sea!”
A boy wearing an apron entered and spoke to him in low tones.
“Ah! very good!” said Lamartine, “it is my luncheon. Will you share it
with me, Hugo?”
“Thanks, I have already lunched.”
“I haven’t and I am dying of hunger. At least come and look on at the
feast; I will let you go, afterwards.”
He showed me into a room that gave on to an interior court-yard. A
gentle faced young man who was writing at a table rose and was about to
withdraw. He was the young workman whom Louis Blanc had had attached to
the Provisional Government.
“Stay where you are, Albert,” said Lamartine, “I have nothing of a
private nature to say to Victor Hugo.”
We saluted each other, M. Albert and I.
The little waiter showed Lamartine a table upon which were some mutton
cutlets in an earthenware dish, some bread, a bottle of wine and a
glass. The whole came from a wine-shop in the neighbourhood.
“Well,” exclaimed Lamartine, “what about a knife and fork?”
“I thought you had knives and forks here,” returned the boy. “I had
trouble enough to bring the luncheon, and if I have got to go and fetch
knives and forks--”
“Pshaw!” said Lamartine, “one must take things as they come!”
He broke the bread, took a cutlet by the bone and tore the meat with
his teeth. When he had finished he threw the bone into the fireplace. In
this manner he disposed of three cutlets, and drank two glasses of wine.
“You will agree with me that this is a primitive repast!” he said. “But
it is an improvement on our supper last night. We had only bread
and cheese among us, and we all drank water from the same chipped
sugar-bowl. Which didn’t, it appears, prevent a newspaper this morning
from denouncing the great orgy of the Provisional Government!”
I did not find Victor in the room where he was to have waited for me.
I supposed that, having become tired of waiting, he had returned home
alone.
When I issued on to the Place de Grève the crowd was still excited
and in a state of consternation at the inexplicable collision that had
occurred an hour before. The body of a wounded man who had just expired
was carried past me. They told me that it was the fifth. It was taken,
as the other bodies had been taken, to the Salle Saint Jean, where
the dead of the previous day to the number of over a hundred had been
exposed.
Before returning to the Place Royale I made a tour for the purpose of
visiting our guard-houses. Outside the Minimes Barracks a boy of about
fifteen years, armed with the rifle of a soldier of the line, was
proudly mounting guard. It seemed to me that I had seen him there in the
morning or the day before.
“What!” I said, “are you doing sentry duty again?”
“No, not again; I haven’t yet been relieved.”
“You don’t say so. Why, how long have you been here?”
“Oh, about seventeen hours!”
“What! haven’t you slept? Haven’t you eaten?”
“Yes, I have had something to eat.”
“You went to get it, of course?”
“No, I didn’t, a sentry does not quit his post! This morning I shouted
to the people in the shop across the way that I was hungry, and they
brought me some bread.”