My Visit to the Barricade

My coachman deposited me at the corner of Saint Eustache, and said to me, “Here you are in the hornets’ nest.”

He added, “I will wait for you in the Rue de la Vrillière, near the Place des Victoires. Take your time.”

I began walking from barricade to barricade.

In the first I met De Flotte, who offered to serve me as a guide. There is not a more determined man than De Flotte. I accepted his offer; he took me everywhere where my presence could be of use.

On the way he gave me an account of the steps taken by him to print our proclamations; Boulé‘s printing-office having failed him, he had applied to a lithographic press, at No. 30, Rue Bergère, and at the peril of their lives two brave men had printed 500 copies of our decrees. These two true-hearted workmen were named, the one Rubens, the other Achille Poincellot.

While walking I made jottings in pencil (with Baudin’s pencil, which I had with me); I registered facts at random; I reproduce this page here. These living facts are useful for History; the coup d’état is there, as though freshly bleeding.

“Morning of the 4th. It looks as if the combat was suspended. Will it burst forth again? Barricades visited by me: one at the corner of Saint Eustache. One at the Oyster Market. One in the Rue Mauconseil. One in the Rue Tiquetonne. One in the Rue Mandar (Rocher de Cancale). One barring the Rue du Cadran and the Rue Montorgueil. Four closing the Petit–Carreau. The beginning of one between the Rue des Deux Portes and the Rue Saint Sauveur, barring the Rue Saint Denis. One, the largest, barring the Rue Saint Denis, at the top of the Rue Guérin-Boisseau. One barring the Rue Grenetat. One farther on in the Rue Grenetat, barring the Rue Bourg–Labbé (in the centre an overturned flour wagon; a good barricade). In the Rue Saint Denis one barring the Rue de Petit–Lion-Saint–Sauveur. One barring the Rue du Grand Hurleur, with its four corners barricaded. This barricade has already been attacked this morning. A combatant, Massonnet, a comb-maker of 154, Rue Saint Denis, received a ball in his overcoat; Dupapet, called ‘the man with the long beard,’ was the last to stay on the summit of the barricade. He was heard to cry out to the officers commanding the attack, ‘You are traitors!’ He is believed to have been shot. The troops retired — strange to say without demolishing the barricade. A barricade is being constructed in the Rue du Renard. Some National Guards in uniform watch its construction, but do not work on it. One of them said to me, ‘We are not against you, you are on the side of Right.’ They add that there are twelve or fifteen barricades in the Rue Rambuteau. This morning at daybreak the cannon had fired ‘steadily,’ as one of them remarks, in the Rue Bourbon–Villeneuve. I visit a powder manufactory improvised by Leguevel at a chemist’s opposite the Rue Guérin-Boisseau.

“They are constructing the barricades amicably, without angering any one. They do what they can not to annoy the neighborhood. The combatants of the Bourg–Labbé barricades are ankle-deep in mud on account of the rain. It is a perfect sewer. They hesitate to ask for a truss of straw. They lie down in the water or on the pavement.

“I saw there a young man who was ill, and who had just got up from his bed with the fever still on him. He said to me, ‘I am going to my death’ (he did so).

“In the Rue Bourbon–Villeneuve they had not even asked a mattress of the ‘shopkeepers,’ although, the barricade being bombarded, they needed them to deaden the effect of the balls.

“The soldiers make bad barricades, because they make them too well. A barricade should be tottering; when well built it is worth nothing; the paving-stones should want equilibrium, ‘so that they may roll down on the troopers,’ said a street-boy to me, ‘and break their paws.’ Sprains form a part of barricade warfare.

“Jeanty Sarre is the chief of a complete group of barricades. He presented his first lieutenant to me, Charpentier, a man of thirty-six, lettered and scientific. Charpentier busies himself with experiments with the object of substituting gas for coal and wood in the firing of china, and he asks permission to read a tragedy to me ‘one of these days.’ I said to him, ‘We shall make one.’

“Jeanty Sarre is grumbling at Charpentier; the ammunition is failing. Jeanty Sarre, having at his house in the Rue Saint Honoré a pound of fowling-powder and twenty army cartridges, sent Charpentier to get them. Charpentier went there, and brought back the fowling-powder and the cartridges, but distributed them to the combatants on the barricades whom he met on the way. ‘They were as though famished,’ said he. Charpentier had never in his life touched a fire-............