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With all the mechanical inventions of the century; with all the intelligence and technical skill of the worker accustomed to deal with complicated machinery; with inventors, chemists, professors of botany, practical botanists like the market gardeners of Gennevilliers; with all the plant that they could use for multiplying and improving machinery; and, finally, with the organizing spirit of the Parisian people, their pluck and energy with all these at its command, the agriculture of the anarchist Commune of Paris would be a very different thing from the rude husbandry of the Ardennes.
That night what crowds thronged from Paris to the top of the Montmartre heights, from the observatory on which the celebrated inventor Bazin had lighted up, with some magical electric machine, all the plain of Gennevilliers from Mont Valerien to the Fort de la Briche!
As it had always been, so it was now; confidence reigned everywhere: they would drive the Prussians from their position, would pulverize them, annihilate them. Great preparations were being made in the peninsula of Gennevilliers, the point where there was most likelihood of the operation being attended with success.
Laronciere is said to have swept the peninsula of Gennevilliers and compelled a Saxon regiment to lay down its arms, and Vinoy is said to have destroyed the Prussian works beyond Bougival. As to Ducros, he has crossed the Marne, taken and retaken Montedy, and almost holds Villiers-sur-Marne. What one experiences on hearing the cannon is a great desire to be there.
The simplest, like old Lanze and his daughter Lina, are intrinsically commonplace; the most elaborated, like Madame Tonska and the duke Jean-Théodore, waver between familiar types and questionable shadows; and those that, like Laudon and the Gennevilliers, promise better results, are imperfectly developed. Such defects would be fatal in a novel of the ordinary kind.
AS Claude could not paint his huge picture in the small studio of the Rue de Douai, he made up his mind to rent some shed that would be spacious enough, elsewhere; and strolling one day on the heights of Montmartre, he found what he wanted half way down the slope of the Rue Tourlaque, a street that descends abruptly behind the cemetery, and whence one overlooks Clichy as far as the marshes of Gennevilliers.
So far, the enterprise only comprised four pavilions out of the fourteen which it was proposed to erect on the vast site given by the City of Paris on the peninsula of Gennevilliers*; and so the subscription fund remained open, and, indeed, no little noise was made over this charitable enterprise, which was regarded as a complete and peremptory reply to the accusations of those evilly disposed persons who charged the satiated /bourgeoisie/ with doing nothing for the workers.
They have done some duty in the trenches, but they were always kept away from serious fighting, and only gave a "moral support" to those engaged in the conflict, until the fiasco in the Isthmus of Gennevilliers a fortnight ago.
So far, the enterprise only comprised four pavilions out of the fourteen which it was proposed to erect on the vast site given by the City of Paris on the peninsula of Gennevilliers*; and so the subscription fund remained open, and, indeed, no little noise was made over this charitable enterprise, which was regarded as a complete and peremptory reply to the accusations of those evilly disposed persons who charged the satiated bourgeoisie with doing nothing for the workers.
Two months later, the whole court was present at the representation of the Mariage de Figaro, given at the house of M. de Vandreuil, an intimate friend of the Duchess of Polignac, on his stage at Gennevilliers. "You will see that Beaumarchais will have more influence than the keeper of the seals," Louis XVI. had said, himself foreseeing his own defeat.
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