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Edinburgh was alive in those days to her very paving-stones; town and university combined to form a hotbed of intellectual unrest, a breeding-ground for disturbing possibilities.
It is surprising how rapidly in an emergency a barricade can be formed. A carriage or two is overturned, furniture is brought out from neighboring houses, a large tree, if available, is cut down, and the whole is strengthened with paving-stones. By night all Paris had become a field of battle.
Sometimes when he was in bed he dreamed that a fight was going on in the wardrobe; he could hear guns being fired there, paving-stones being torn up and piled into barricades, and voices shouting in clamorous triumph; and he said to himself that it was his money fighting against the Government. La Sarriette, however, had stretched out her hands with a cry of delight.
Some wished to reoccupy their position in the Mairie, but it was impossible for them to maintain any defence there, the Mairie being open and commanded from every side; they scaled the walls and scattered themselves about in the neighboring houses; others escaped by the narrow passage of the boulevard which led into the Rue Saint Jean; most of the combatants reached the opposite side of the boulevard, while those who had a cartridge left fired a last volley upon the troops from the height of the paving-stones.
For the space of a mile or two beyond the gate, this ancient and famous road is as desolate and disagreeable as most of the other Roman avenues. It extends over small, uncomfortable paving-stones, between brick and plastered walls, which are very solidly constructed, and so high as almost to exclude a view of the surrounding country.
Let me entreat you to remain below. We shall fight with more confidence when we know that you are safe." Ellen's suggestion, however, was carried out, and men were immediately sent to break up the paving-stones in the back part of the house. The blacks, at all events, were not likely to gain an easy victory.
The strokes of the bare feet had worn grooves inches deep in the stone flags; it had taken many generations of swinging children to accomplish that. Everywhere in the town were the mold and decay that go with antiquity, and evidence of it; but I do not know that anything else gave us so vivid a sense of the old age of Heilbronn as those footworn grooves in the paving-stones.
I actually passed two terrible nights, and I succeeded in restraining the secular arm only by showing that your book was an academical dissertation, and not the manifesto of an incendiary. Your style is too lofty ever to be of service to the madmen who in discussing the gravest questions of our social order, use paving-stones as their weapons.
The courtyard slept in the white twilight, the roofs shed an unimaginable tenderness upon the climbing rosebushes and the bright paving-stones. Some one sitting on a beam was making merry at the expense of my childhood and my white apron. My great uncle sang some melody from the capital. I can see him again, standing upright with his head thrown back. The air trembled softly.
He told her of Arles, his birthplace, with its Roman masonry and amphitheatre; of a turreted terraced chateau and a family of aristocrats lording it among the vineyards; conspiring a little later with other noble families, entertaining them at secret meetings of the Chiffonne, where oaths were taken; later again, defending itself behind barricades of paving-stones; last of all, marched or carried in batches to the guillotine or the fusillade.
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