Chapter 1: 5.iv

To Arms!

So hangs it, dubious, fateful, in the sultry days of July. It is
the passionate printed _advice_ of M. Marat, to abstain, of all
things, from violence.[168] Nevertheless the hungry poor are
already burning Town Barriers, where Tribute on eatables is
levied; getting clamorous for food.

The twelfth July morning is Sunday; the streets are all placarded
with an enormous-sized _De par le Roi_, “inviting peaceable
citizens to remain within doors,” to feel no alarm, to gather in
no crowd. Why so? What mean these “placards of enormous size”?
Above all, what means this clatter of military; dragoons,
hussars, rattling in from all points of the compass towards the
Place Louis Quinze; with a staid gravity of face, though saluted
with mere nicknames, hootings and even missiles?[169] Besenval is
with them. Swiss Guards of his are already in the Champs Elysées,
with four pieces of artillery.

Have the destroyers descended on us, then? From the Bridge of
Sèvres to utmost Vincennes, from Saint-Denis to the
Champ-de-Mars, we are begirt! Alarm, of the vague unknown, is in
every heart. The Palais Royal has become a place of awestruck
interjections, silent shakings of the head: one can fancy with
what dolorous sound the noon-tide cannon (which the Sun fires at
the crossing of his meridian) went off there; bodeful, like an
inarticulate voice of doom.[170] Are these troops verily come out
“against Brigands”? Where are the Brigands? What mystery is in
the wind?—Hark! a human voice reporting articulately the
Job’s-news: _Necker, People’s Minister, Saviour of France, is
dismissed_. Impossible; incredible! Treasonous to the public
peace! Such a voice ought to be choked in the
water-works;[171]—had not the news-bringer quickly fled.
Nevertheless, friends, make of it what you will, the news is
true. Necker is gone. Necker hies northward incessantly, in
obedient secrecy, since yesternight. We have a new Ministry:
Broglie the War-god; Aristocrat Bréteuil; Foulon who said the
people might eat grass!

Rumour, therefore, shall arise; in the Palais Royal, and in broad
France. Paleness sits on every face; confused tremor and
fremescence; waxing into thunder-peals, of Fury stirred on by
Fear.

But see Camille Desmoulins, from the Café de Foy, rushing out,
sibylline in face; his hair streaming, in each hand a pistol! He
springs to a table: the Police satellites are eyeing him; alive
they shall not take him, not they alive him alive. This time he
speaks without stammering:—Friends, shall we die like hunted
hares? Like sheep hounded into their pinfold; bleating for mercy,
where is no mercy, but only a whetted knife? The hour is come;
the supreme hour of Frenchman and Man; when Oppressors are to try
conclusions with Oppressed; and the word is, swift Death, or
Deliverance forever. Let such hour be _well_-come! Us, meseems,
one cry only befits: To Arms! Let universal Paris, universal
France, as with the throat of the whirlwind, sound only: To
arms!—‘To arms!’ yell responsive the innumerable voices: like one
great voice, as of a Demon yelling from the air: for all faces
wax fire-eyed, all hearts burn up into madness. In such, or
fitter words,[172] does Camille evoke the Elemental Powers, in
this great moment.—Friends, continues Camille, some rallying
sign! Cockades; green ones;—the colour of hope!—As with the
flight of locusts, these green tree leaves; green ribands from
the neighbouring shops; all green things are snatched, and made
cockades of. Camille descends from his table, “stifled with
embraces, wetted with tears;” has a bit of green riband handed
him; sticks it in his hat. And now to Curtius’ Image-shop there;
to the Boulevards; to the four winds; and rest not till France be
on fire!

France, so long shaken and wind-parched, is probably at the right
inflammable point.—As for poor Curtius, who, one grieves to
think, might be but imperfectly paid,—he cannot make two words
about his Images. The Wax-bust of Necker, the Wax-bust of
D’Orléans, helpers of France: these, covered with crape, as in
funeral procession, or after the manner of suppliants appealing
to Heaven, to Earth, and Tartarus itself, a mixed multitude bears
off. For a sign! As indeed man, with his singular imaginative
faculties, can do little or nothing without signs: thus Turks
look to their Prophet’s banner; also Osier _Mannikins_ have been
burnt, and Necker’s Portrait has erewhile figured, aloft on its
perch.

In this manner march they, a mixed, continually increasing
multitude; armed with axes, staves and miscellanea; grim,
many-sounding, through the streets. Be all Theatres shut; let all
dancing, on planked floor, or on the natural greensward, cease!
Instead of a Christian Sabbath, and feast of _guinguette_
tabernacles, it shall be a Sorcerer’s Sabbath; and Paris, gone
rabid, dance,—with the Fiend for piper!

However, Besenval, with horse and foot, is in the Place Louis
Quinze. Mortals promenading homewards, in the fall of the day,
saunter by, from Chaillot or Passy, from flirtation and a little
thin wine; with sadder step than usual. Will the Bust-Procession
pass that way! Behold it; behold also Prince Lambesc dash forth
on it, with his Royal-Allemands! Shots fall, and sabre-strokes;
Busts are hewn asunder; and, alas, also heads of men. A sabred
Procession has nothing for it but to _explode_, along what
streets, alleys, Tuileries Avenues it finds; and disappear. One
unarmed man lies hewed down; a Garde Française by his uniform:
bear him (or bear even the report of him) dead and gory to his
Barracks;—where he has comrades still alive!

But why not now, victorious Lambesc, charge through that
Tuileries Garden itself, where the fugitives are vanishing? Not
show the Sunday promenaders too, how steel glitters, besprent
with blood; that it be told of, and men’s ears tingle?—Tingle,
alas, they did; but the wrong way. Victorious Lambesc, in this
his second or Tuileries charge, succeeds but in overturning (call
it not slashing, for he struck with the flat of his sword) one
man, a poor old schoolmaster, most pacifically tottering there;
and is driven out, by barricade of chairs, by flights of “bottles
and glasses,” by execrations in bass voice and treble. Most
delicate is the mob-queller’s vocation; wherein Too-much may be
as bad as Not-enough. For each of these bass voices, and more
each treble voice, borne to all points of the City, rings now
nothing but distracted indignation; will ring all another. The
cry, _To arms!_ roars tenfold; steeples with their metal
storm-voice boom out, as the sun sinks; armorer’s shops are
broken open, plundered; the streets are a living foam-sea, chafed
by all the winds.

Such issue came of Lambesc’s charge on the Tuileries Garden: no
striking of salutary terror into Chaillot promenaders; a striking
into broad wakefulness of Frenzy and the three Furies,—which
otherwise were not asleep! For they lie always, those
subterranean Eumenides (fabulous and yet so true), in the dullest
existence of man;—and can dance, brandishing their dusky torches,
shaking their serpent-hair. Lambesc with Royal-Allemand may ride
to his barracks, with curses for his marching-music; then ride
back again, like one troubled in mind: vengeful Gardes
Françaises, _sacre_ing, with knit brows, start out on him, from
their barracks in the Chaussé d’Antin; pour a volley into him
(killing and wounding); which he must not answer, but ride
on.[173]

Counsel dwells not under the plumed hat. If the Eumenides awaken,
and Broglie has given no orders, what can a Besenval do? When the
Gardes Françaises, with Palais-Royal volunteers, roll down,
greedy of more vengeance, to the Place Louis Quinze itself, they
find neither Besenval, Lambesc, Royal-Allemand, nor any soldier
now there. Gone is military order. On the far Eastern Boulevard,
of Saint-Antoine, the Chasseurs Normandie arrive, dusty, thirsty,
after a hard day’s ride; but can find no billet-master, see no
course in this City of confusions; cannot get to Besenval, cannot
so much as discover where he is: Normandie must even bivouac
there, in its dust and thirst,—unless some patriot will treat it
to a cup of liquor, with advices.

Raging multitudes surround the Hôtel-de-Ville, crying: Arms!
Orders! The Six-and-twenty Town-Councillors, with their long
gowns, have ducked under (into the raging chaos);—shall never
emerge more. Besenval is painfully wriggling himself out, to the
Champ-de-Mars; he must sit there “in the cruelest uncertainty:”
courier after courier may dash off for Versailles; but will bring
back no answer, can hardly bring himself back. For the roads are
all blocked with batteries and pickets, with floods of carriages
arrested for examination: such was Broglie’s one sole order; the
Œil-de-Bœuf, hearing in the distance such mad din, which sounded
almost like invasion, will before all things keep its own head
whole. A new Ministry, with, as it were, but one foot in the
stirrup, cannot take leaps. Mad Paris is abandoned altogether to
itself.

What a Paris, when the darkness fell! A European metropolitan
City hurled suddenly forth from its old combinations and
arrangements; to crash tumultuously together, seeking new. Use
and wont will now no longer direct any man; each man, with what
of originality he has, must begin thinking; or following those
that think. Seven hundred thousand individuals, on the sudden,
find all their old paths, old ways of acting and deciding, vanish
from under their feet. And so there go they, with clangour and
terror, they know not as yet whether running, swimming or
flying,—headlong into the New Era. With clangour and terror: from
above, Broglie the war-god impends, preternatural, with his
redhot cannon-balls; and from below, a preternatural
Brigand-world menaces with dirk and firebrand: madness rules the
hour.

Happily, in place of the submerged Twenty-six, the Electoral Club
is gathering; has declared itself a “Provisional Municipality.”
On the morrow it will get Provost Flesselles, with an Echevin or
two, to give help in many things. For the present it decrees one
most essential thing: that forthwith a “Parisian Militia” shall
be enrolled. Depart, ye heads of Districts, to labour in this
great work; while we here, in Permanent Committee, sit alert. Let
fencible men, each party in its own range of streets, keep watch
and ward, all night. Let Paris court a little fever-sleep;
confused by such fever-dreams, of “violent motions at the Palais
Royal;”—or from time to time start awake, and look out,
palpitating, in its nightcap, at the clash of discordant
mutually-unintelligible Patrols; on the gleam of distant
Barriers, going up all-too ruddy towards the vault of Night.[174]