Les Misérables, Victor Hugo [best love novels of all time .TXT] 📗
- Author: Victor Hugo
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One day a man with his beard worn like a collar and with an Italian accent mounted a stone post at the door of a liquor-seller in the Marché Lenoir, and read aloud a singular document, which seemed to emanate from an occult power. Groups formed around him, and applauded.
The passages which touched the crowd most deeply were collected and noted down. “—Our doctrines are trammelled, our proclamations torn, our bill-stickers are spied upon and thrown into prison.”—“The breakdown which has recently taken place in cottons has converted to us many mediums.”—“The future of nations is being worked out in our obscure ranks.”—“Here are the fixed terms: action or reaction, revolution or counter-revolution. For, at our epoch, we no longer believe either in inertia or in immobility. For the people against the people, that is the question. There is no other.”—“On the day when we cease to suit you, break us, but up to that day, help us to march on.” All this in broad daylight.
Other deeds, more audacious still, were suspicious in the eyes of the people by reason of their very audacity. On the 4th of April, 1832, a passer-by mounted the post on the corner which forms the angle of the Rue Sainte-Marguerite and shouted: “I am a Babouvist!” But beneath Babeuf, the people scented Gisquet.
Among other things, this man said:—
“Down with property! The opposition of the left is cowardly and treacherous. When it wants to be on the right side, it preaches revolution, it is democratic in order to escape being beaten, and royalist so that it may not have to fight. The republicans are beasts with feathers. Distrust the republicans, citizens of the laboring classes.”
“Silence, citizen spy!” cried an artisan.
This shout put an end to the discourse.
Mysterious incidents occurred.
At nightfall, a workingman encountered near the canal a “very well dressed man,” who said to him: “Whither are you bound, citizen?” “Sir,” replied the workingman, “I have not the honor of your acquaintance.” “I know you very well, however.” And the man added: “Don’t be alarmed, I am an agent of the committee. You are suspected of not being quite faithful. You know that if you reveal anything, there is an eye fixed on you.” Then he shook hands with the workingman and went away, saying: “We shall meet again soon.”
The police, who were on the alert, collected singular dialogues, not only in the wine-shops, but in the street.
“Get yourself received very soon,” said a weaver to a cabinet-maker.
“Why?”
“There is going to be a shot to fire.”
Two ragged pedestrians exchanged these remarkable replies, fraught with evident Jacquerie:—
“Who governs us?”
“M. Philippe.”
“No, it is the bourgeoisie.”
The reader is mistaken if he thinks that we take the word Jacquerie in a bad sense. The Jacques were the poor.
On another occasion two men were heard to say to each other as they passed by: “We have a good plan of attack.”
Only the following was caught of a private conversation between four men who were crouching in a ditch of the circle of the Barrière du Trône:—
“Everything possible will be done to prevent his walking about Paris any more.”
Who was the he? Menacing obscurity.
“The principal leaders,” as they said in the faubourg, held themselves apart. It was supposed that they met for consultation in a wine-shop near the point Saint-Eustache. A certain Aug—, chief of the Society aid for tailors, Rue Mondétour, had the reputation of serving as intermediary central between the leaders and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
Nevertheless, there was always a great deal of mystery about these leaders, and no certain fact can invalidate the singular arrogance of this reply made later on by a man accused before the Court of Peers:—
“Who was your leader?”
“I knew of none and I recognized none.”
There was nothing but words, transparent but vague; sometimes idle reports, rumors, hearsay. Other indications cropped up.
A carpenter, occupied in nailing boards to a fence around the ground on which a house was in process of construction, in the Rue de Reuilly found on that plot the torn fragment of a letter on which were still legible the following lines:—
The committee must take measures to prevent recruiting in the sections for the different societies.
And, as a postscript:—
We have learned that there are guns in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, No. 5 [bis], to the number of five or six thousand, in the house of a gunsmith in that court. The section owns no arms.
What excited the carpenter and caused him to show this thing to his neighbors was the fact, that a few paces further on he picked up another paper, torn like the first, and still more significant, of which we reproduce a facsimile, because of the historical interest attaching to these strange documents:—
| Q | C | D | E | Learn this list by heart. After so doing
| | | | | | you will tear it up. The men admitted
| | | | | | will do the same when you have transmitted
| | | | | | their orders to them.
| | | | | | Health and Fraternity,
| | | | | | u og a’ fe L. |
+——————————————————————————————+
It was only later on that the persons who were in the secret of this find at the time, learned the significance of those four capital letters: quinturions, centurions, decurions, éclaireurs [scouts], and the sense of the letters: u og a’ fe, which was a date, and meant April 15th, 1832. Under each capital letter were inscribed names followed by very characteristic notes. Thus: Q. Bannerel. 8 guns, 83 cartridges. A safe man.—C. Boubière. 1 pistol, 40 cartridges.—D. Rollet. 1 foil, 1 pistol, 1 pound of powder.—E. Tessier. 1 sword, 1 cartridge-box. Exact.— Terreur. 8 guns. Brave, etc.
Finally, this carpenter found, still in the same enclosure, a third paper on which was written in pencil, but very legibly, this sort of enigmatical list:—
Barra. Soize. Salle-au-Comte.
Kosciusko. Aubry the Butcher?
J. J. R.
Caius Gracchus.
Right of revision. Dufond. Four.
Fall of the Girondists. Derbac. Maubuée.
Washington. Pinson. 1 pistol, 86 cartridges.
Marseillaise.
Sovereignty of the people. Michel. Quincampoix. Sword.
Hoche.
Marceau. Plato. Arbre-Sec.
Warsaw. Tilly, crier of the Populaire.
The honest bourgeois into whose hands this list fell knew its significance. It appears that this list was the complete nomenclature of the sections of the fourth arondissement of the Society of the Rights of Man, with the names and dwellings of the chiefs of sections. To-day, when all these facts which were obscure are nothing more than history, we may publish them. It should be added, that the foundation of the Society of the Rights of Man seems to have been posterior to the date when this paper was found. Perhaps this was only a rough draft.
Still, according to all the remarks and the words, according to written notes, material facts begin to make their appearance.
In the Rue Popincourt, in the house of a dealer in bric-à-brac, there were seized seven sheets of gray paper, all folded alike lengthwise and in four; these sheets enclosed twenty-six squares of this same gray paper folded in the form of a cartridge, and a card, on which was written the following:—
Sulphur . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ounces.
Charcoal . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ounces and a half.
Water . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ounces.
The report of the seizure stated that the drawer exhaled a strong smell of powder.
A mason returning from his day’s work, left behind him a little package on a bench near the bridge of Austerlitz. This package was taken to the police station. It was opened, and in it were found two printed dialogues, signed Lahautière, a song entitled: “Workmen, band together,” and a tin box full of cartridges.
One artisan drinking with a comrade made the latter feel him to see how warm he was; the other man felt a pistol under his waistcoat.
In a ditch on the boulevard, between Père-Lachaise and the Barrière du Trône, at the most deserted spot, some children, while playing, discovered beneath a mass of shavings and refuse bits of wood, a bag containing a bullet-mould, a wooden punch for the preparation of cartridges, a wooden bowl, in which there were grains of hunting-powder, and a little cast-iron pot whose interior presented evident traces of melted lead.
Police agents, making their way suddenly and unexpectedly at five o’clock in the morning, into the dwelling of a certain Pardon, who was afterwards a member of the Barricade-Merry section and got himself killed in the insurrection of April, 1834, found him standing near his bed, and holding in his hand some cartridges which he was in the act of preparing.
Towards the hour when workingmen repose, two men were seen to meet between the Barrière Picpus and the Barrière Charenton in a little lane between two walls, near a wine-shop, in front of which there was a “Jeu de Siam."33 One drew a pistol from beneath his blouse and handed it to the other. As he was handing it to him, he noticed that the perspiration of his chest had made the powder damp. He primed the pistol and added more powder to what was already in the pan. Then the two men parted.
A certain Gallais, afterwards killed in the Rue Beaubourg in the affair of April, boasted of having in his house seven hundred cartridges and twenty-four flints.
The government one day received a warning that arms and two hundred thousand cartridges had just been distributed in the faubourg. On the following week thirty thousand cartridges were distributed. The remarkable point about it was, that the police were not able to seize a single one.
An intercepted letter read: “The day is not far distant when, within four hours by the clock, eighty thousand patriots will be under arms.”
All this fermentation was public, one might almost say tranquil. The approaching insurrection was preparing its storm calmly in the face of the government. No singularity was lacking to this still subterranean crisis, which was already perceptible. The bourgeois talked peaceably to the working-classes of what was in preparation. They said: “How is the rising coming along?” in the same tone in which they would have said: “How is your wife?”
A furniture-dealer, of the Rue Moreau, inquired: “Well, when are you going to make the attack?”
Another shop-keeper said:—
“The attack will be made soon.”
“I know it. A month ago, there were fifteen thousand of you, now there are twenty-five thousand.” He offered his gun, and a neighbor offered a small pistol which he was willing to sell for seven francs.
Moreover, the revolutionary fever was growing. Not a point in Paris nor in France was exempt from it. The artery was beating everywhere. Like those membranes which arise from certain inflammations and form in the human body, the network of secret societies began to spread all over the country. From the associations of the Friends of the People, which was at the same time public and secret, sprang the Society of the Rights of Man, which also dated from one of the orders of the day: Pluviôse, Year 40 of the republican era, which was destined to survive even the mandate of the Court of Assizes which pronounced its dissolution, and which did not hesitate to bestow on its sections significant names like the following:—
Tocsin.
Signal cannon.
Phrygian cap.
January 21.
The beggars.
The vagabonds.
Forward march.
Robespierre.
Level.
Ça Ira.
The Society of the Rights of Man engendered the Society of Action. These were impatient individuals who broke away and hastened ahead. Other associations sought to recruit
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