The procession the next morning moved down the Champs Élysées and
across the Place de la Concorde and along the Rue de Rivoli to Notre
Dame, from whence, after the ceremony there, it proceeded on to the
Panthéon. All of this line of march was guarded on either side by
double lines of infantry, and one can obtain an idea of how great was
the crowd behind them by the fact that on the morning of the procession
five hundred people were taken in ambulances to the different hospitals
of Paris. This included those who had fainted in the crush, or who
had been overcome by the heat, or who had fallen from one of the many
tottering scaffoldings. Each of the great vases along the iron fence
of the Tuileries held one or two men, one of whom sat opposite us
across the Rue de Rivoli, who had been there six hours, like Stylites
on his pillar, except that the Parisian had an opera-glass, a morning
paper, and a bottle of red wine to keep him company. The trees in the
Tuileries were blackened with men, and the sky-line of every house-top
moved with them. The crowd was greatest perhaps in the Place de la
Concorde, where it spread a black carpet over the great square, which
parted and fell away before the repeated charges of the cavalry like a
piece of cloth before a pair of shears. It was a most orderly crowd,
and an extremely good-humored one, and it manifested no strong feeling
at any time, except over two features of the procession, which had
nothing to do with the death of Carnot. Except when there was music,
which was much too seldom, the crowd chattered and laughed as it might
have done at a purely military function, and only the stern hisses of a
few kept the majority from applauding any one who passed for whom they
held an especial interest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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