Connected with such scenes as these, in as far as they tended to
produce the last stirring sketches with which the Parisian Sketch-book
was filled in the month of June, are others, which can only be
fleetingly turned over. There is the large dingily lighted club-room,
with its dark tribune, its president and secretaries and accolytes,
dressed in blue smocks, with blood-red scarfs and cravats--its fiery
orators denouncing the _bourgeois_ to the hatred of the working
classes, and instilling division, rancour, battle to the death between
classes, with violent gesture and frowning brow; and its benches and
galleries filled with a fermenting crowd, that yells and clamours, and
applauds the sentiment of "hatred and death" to the _bourgeois_. It is
no uninteresting, although a heart-wearying _chiaro-oscuro_ scene,
with its strong lights and dark shades--albeit, in its moral as well
as its material aspect, the lights are few, the shades many, and dark
to utter blackness. Connected with the same _suite_ of subjects, also,
is the nature of the small room in the crooked streets of the _Cité_,
or the suburb, with a table spread with papers, around which sit
bearded full-faced men, discussing sternly, as may be seen by the
scanty lamplight that illumines those haggard physiognomies; it is the
room of the conspirators of the "Red Republic," or of the
revolutionary agents to be despatched throughout the country, and into
other lands, to propagandise the doctrine of destruction to all that
_is_. But this scene must surely be a fancy sketch. Connected, also,
is that black sketch of a cellar, in which are concealed arms, guns,
pistols, lead, cartridges, barrels of powder, that have evidently
fallen into the hands of subversive anarchist conspirators, by means
of the connivance, treachery, or at least culpable negligence of those
placed in power by the sovereign Assembly, and that have been conveyed
thither hidden in wood, in bales, in sacks, amidst provisions.
Connected, also, are many other gloomy vignettes. The scribbler in the
small room, writing with a sneer of bitterness upon his lip, and the
stamp of overflowing bile on his pale face, writing with the red cap
of liberty on his head, as if to inspire his brains with visions of
all the horrors of a past revolution, glancing now and then, for a
hint, at the portraits of Marat and Robespierre, which decorate his
room, and grasping, now and then, the pistols on the table by his
side, as if to instil the smell of powder and the breath of murder
into the very lines he writes;-and again, the printing press worked by
the light of the dying candle;--and again, in the hazy morning, the
figure of the newspaper vender, swaggering down the boulevard, and
skreeching out, with hoarse voice, the "True Republic," or the
"People's Friend;" and of the deluded workman, who leans, after his
morning dram, against a post, and sucks in the revolutionary poison of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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