Part 172 (1/2)
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 pa.s.ser-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 cla.s.ses.”
”Silence, citizen spy!” cried an artisan.
This shout put an end to the discourse.
Mysterious incidents occurred.
At nightfall, a workingman encountered near the ca.n.a.l 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 pa.s.sed 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 Barriere du Trone:--
”Everything possible will be done to prevent his walking about Paris any more.”
Who was the he? Menacing obscurity.
”The princ.i.p.al 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 Mondetour, 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:--