THE FIRST ROLL OF THUNDER.
The time had come.
One night the streets of Paris were darkened by crowds of silent, stern
men whose eager faces looked sinister in the lamplight, as they turned
invariably toward the Place do Grève. The men moved swiftly on in
comparative silence; but wherever they paused a warehouse was broken
open, and everything of iron or steel it contained taken therefrom,
though all other articles were scrupulously left untouched.
Women, too, came out of their domicils, and swelled the stream that
poured into the Place de Grève. Each carried some burden—a loaf of
bread, a bar of rusty iron, or a ponderous fire-shovel, from her own
hearthstone. Before midnight the Place de Grève, and the adjoining
streets broke into a blaze. Anvils and forges in full blast seemed to
start out of the very earth, lighting up all the grand outlines of the
Hotel de Ville and the great crowds of men and women that swarmed around
it, with gleams of light thrown against deep, deep shadows, that made
the whole scene terrible. To this was added the sharp ring of iron
against steel, the roll of wheels bringing in heavy loads of plunder,
the crash of hammers thundering to each other, and the awful hum and
swell of angry voices in suppression.
Men toiled that night like demons. Many who had thought themselves too
feeble and famished for exertion, now wrangled with each other for a
chance of work at the forges. Pale, hungry faces grew stern as death in
the lurid light of the fire; while demagogues from the clubs, and
Bohemians of the press, passed in and out of the crowd with inflammatory
words, which kept the wild enthusiasm at a white heat.
Women crowded in, some with their arms bare to the shoulders, unloading
wagons like men; others enforcing the fiery ardor of the demagogues with
passionate appeals, and hurling bitter taunts on those who stood aloof.
The market women, having broken up their stock for the next day,
distributed stores of provisions to the workmen, and fed the hungry with
their own hands. Some even seized upon the tools, and began to forge
instruments of slaughter with the skill and energy of men; some mounted
on piles of arms already forged, and harangued the men as they worked.
Among these appeared Madame Gosner, the martyr of the day, whose
presence was everywhere heralded with tumults of sympathy and applause.
“Not for my sake,” she cried, mounting a wagon in which crude metal had
been brought to the forges, where she stood like some Roman matron in a
victorious car, “not for my sake, nor for the redemption of one man do I
urge you forward——”
Here the impassioned orator was interrupted by shouts from the women,
and wilder demonstrations from the men, who paused in their work to
listen, and snatch a mouthful of bread from the hands of such women as
were giving food to the hungry, that no man’s strength need fail till
his work was done.
“Let no man stop his work that my voice may be heard,” continued Madame
Gosner. “God will give strength to my lungs, and you shall hear me,
though ten thousand anvils rang out such glorious music as this at a
single crash. In this sound I hear the downfall of that odious prison,
where kings deal with their victims like incarnate demons, chaining them
to walls like beasts of the fields—burying them alive in eternal
darkness—rendering them up to worms and reptiles while yet alive.
“Citizens, this is not the work of one generation, but of many. Kings
and Queens of France have, for generations, held those accursed ramparts
of stones as a monument of their greatness, dear to royalty as the
throne itself. It is an awful contrast which makes the luxury of their
palaces more perfect. Without misery for the people, courts and kings
would never feel how much they are above us. In order to know how high
they are, it is their eternal effort to debase us. We are the beasts of
burden that drag forward their triumphal chariots; creatures to starve
while they riot. By our labor they are fed; by our toil they are
exalted, till pride becomes arrogance, and their very laws are made to
protect them and degrade us.
“The wealth of a nation lies in its labor. Where has that gone which our
forefathers created by the strength of their hands? Look for it in the
enormous estates which cover France from border to shore. Has one of
them descended to the laborers, whose toil wrested them from the
wilderness? Who among you owns a rood of land? Not one. If to you
belongs the sledges you wield, and the spades with which you dig, it is
all that they will give you out of a thousand years of hard toil,
rendered with reckless generosity to these pampered lordlings. What are
these creatures, after all, but things of our own creation? Their
palaces, their estates, their jewels belong to us, and are made the
instruments of our debasement. It has taken a thousand years to
consolidate the power that crushes us. Men and women of France, let us
unite, and a single year shall tear it down.
“I have a husband in one of those hideous dungeons; for years and years
they have buried him from my sight. When we parted, he took me in his
arms, and promised with many a farewell kiss, to return within the
month. My hair was bright with the gloss of youth then—look at it now; I
have not seen his face since then. But I do not plead for him alone;
other women have husbands to lose—other women, for ages on ages have
been made widows, knowing their husbands living, but buried far from the
light of day, as mine is. It is for them I plead and implore you to
shatter these enormous walls, and let God’s free sunshine into those
hideous vaults.
“Every stone of those blackened towers is cemented with blood and
saturated with groans. I ask you to sweep an awful plague spot from the
bosom of France. Let us tear it away, stone by stone—uproot it, rock by
rock; break through those rugged walls, and choke up the festering moat
with their ruins. Citizens, the strong arms of your fathers built this
prison, which your kings have turned into a place of torment that fiends
would shrink from. Are your arms weaker than theirs? What they built
have not you the strength to pull down, or shall the women of France
show you the way?”
A yell went up from that portion of the crowd which surrounded Gosner’s
wife, for there the women of Paris had assembled in the greatest
numbers.
“Give us arms—give us arms, and we will take the prison ourselves,”
shrieked the infuriated women. “There are plenty of arms at the Hôtel
des Invalides—will the men of France get them for us? or shall we storm
the place ourselves?”
These women were answered with one simultaneous shout.
“To the Invalides! to the Invalides!”
A huge mass of the people left the Place de Grève, shouting this cry. In
half an hour they were thundering at the gates of the Invalides.
The governor would have temporized, but some one cried out,
“He only wants time to defeat us!”
That cry was enough to set the whole crowd in motion. They leaped the
ditches, disarmed the sentinels, and plunged headlong into the vaults
below where the arms were stored. The confusion was fearful. These men
crowded on each other in masses, the torches were extinguished, the weak
were trampled down by the strong, but through it all twenty thousand
muskets and some pieces of cannon were taken into the streets of Paris.