United States or Jersey ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The hall was filled with sans-culottes and tricoteuses who came every day to feast their eyes upon the agony of the prisoners, and to accompany them to the guillotine. Never was there such an intense and long-continued thirst for blood as prevailed in those horrible days.
In most minds Paris is associated with gayety, my Paris, on the other hand, is a solemn spot darkened by an impending shadow of calamity. The theatres were closed. No one was admitted to the Invalides, so that I could not see the tomb of Napoleon. The Madeleine was open for service, but deep silence prevailed. In the great spaces of the temple the robed priests bowed before the altar and noiseless groups of worshippers knelt on the pavement. It was a time for earnest prayers. The Louvre was still open and I was fortunate enough to see the Venus of Milo, though a day or two after I believe it was taken from its pedestal and carefully concealed. The expectation was of something dreadful and still the city did not take in the sorrow which lay before it. "Do you think the Prussians will bombard Paris?" I heard a man exclaim, his voice and manner indicating that such a thing was incredible, but the Prussian cannon were close at hand. For our part, my companion and I thought we were in no especial danger. We quartered ourselves comfortably at a pension, walked freely about the streets, and saw what could be seen with the usual zest of healthy young travellers. The little steamboats were still plying on the Seine and we took one at last for the trip that opens to one so much that is beautiful and interesting in architecture and history. It was a lovely afternoon even for summer and we passed in and out under the superb arches of the bridges, beholding the noble apse of Notre Dame with the twin towers rising beyond, structures associated with grim events of the Revolution, the masonry of the quays and the master work of Haussmann who was then putting a new face upon the old city. Now all was bright and no thought of danger entered our minds as we revelled in the pleasures of such an excursion. At length as we stood on the deck we became aware that we were undergoing careful scrutiny from a considerable group who for the most part made up our fellow-passengers. We had had no thought of ourselves as especially marked. My clothes, however, had been made in Germany and had peculiarities no doubt which indicated as much. I was fairly well grounded in French but had no practice in speaking. In trying to talk French, my tongue in spite of me ran into German, which I had been speaking constantly for six months. This was particularly the case if I was at all embarrassed; my face and figure, moreover, were plainly Teutonic and not Latin. The French ascribed their disasters largely to the fact that German spies were everywhere prying into the conditions, and reporting every assailable point and element of weakness. This belief was well grounded; the Germans probably knew France better than the French themselves and skilfully adapted their attacks to the lacks and negligences which the swarming spies laid bare. The group, of whose scrutiny we had become aware, was made up of ouvriers and ouvrières, the men in the invariable blouse, with dark matted hair and black eyes, sometimes with a ratlike keenness of glance as they surveyed us. The women were roughly dressed, sometimes in sabots, with heads bare or surmounted by conical caps. They belonged to the proletariat, the class out of which had come in the Reign of Terror the sans-culottes of evil memory and the tricoteuses who had sat knitting about the guillotine, the class which, within a few months, was again to set the world aghast as the mob of La Commune. As we stood disconcerted by their intent gaze, they put their heads together and talked in low and rapid tones; then their spokesman approached us, a man of polite bearing but ominously stern. He was not a clumsy fellow, but darkly forceful and direct, a man capable of a quick, desperate deed. At the moment there was the grim tiger in their eyes and from the soft paw the swift protrusion of the cruel claw. One thought of the wild revolutionary song, "Ça ça, ça ira, les aristocrats
The throng of tricoteuses and sansculottes was relaxing by this time in its Revolutionary vigilance; its civic zeal had largely cooled; Gamelin and his assailant found themselves the centre of nothing worse than uproar and confusion. Julie fought a way through the press and disappeared in the dark.
Outside the doors, on the steps crowded with the customary swarm of cockaded harridans, Gamelin could hear his name, which the habitués of the Tribunal were beginning to know, passed from mouth to mouth, and was assailed by a bevy of tricoteuses who shook their fists in his face, demanding the head of the Austrian.
His shout was taken up and repeated from one end of the Place de la Révolution to the other. "So perish all who hate France and liberty!" It was a sublime mockery of justice, a deliberate treading under foot of all the rights of man. The sans-culottes and the tricoteuses rivaled each other in the loudness and strength of their applause.
On the third of September they killed again at the Abbaye, at the Force and at the Bernardins prisons; and on the fourth they continued their work of death at La Salpêtriere and Bicêtre. For three days the tocsin sounded. Bands of sans-culottes and tricoteuses, thirsting for blood, traversed the streets, uttering cries of death; and no one seemed to think of checking their sanguinary fury.
From Catherine de Medicis in the struggle of the League, down to Louise Michel, in the recent catastrophe at Paris from the tricoteuses of the first French Revolution to the pétroleuses of the last, woman has seemed to aggravate rather than soothe popular fury. Nor is the history of civil strife nearer home, without parallel examples.
You might as well suppose that the human shape itself, evolved through these millions of years, could suddenly be accommodated to perfect representation of the momentary condition of certain human beings; even the Tricoteuses of the guillotine had the heads and arms of ordinary women, not the beaks and claws of harpies.
Nothing was altered, neither the axes, the fasces, the red caps of Liberty on the wall-paper, nor the insults shouted by the tricoteuses in the galleries to those about to die, nor yet the soul of Fouquier-Tinville, hard-headed, painstaking, zealously turning over his murderous papers, and, in his character of perfect magistrate, sending his friends of yesterday to the scaffold.
Judge and jury toiled, fevered and half asleep with overwork, distracted by the excitement outside and the orders of the sovereign people, menaced by the threats of the sansculottes and tricoteuses who crowded the galleries and the public enclosure, relying on insane evidence, acting on the denunciations of madmen, in a poisonous atmosphere that stupefied the brain, set ears hammering and temples beating and darkened the eyes with a veil of blood.
Word Of The Day