those prints, more deadly and damning to his mind, and more fatal to
his future existence, than the dram is deleterious to his health, and
pernicious to his future life; and prepares his mind for the bayonet
and the gun-barrel, by which he means to destroy all those detested,
and, his paper tells him, detestable beings, who have toiled to
possess any wealth, while he possesses nothing;--and again, by night,
the meeting of the man in power and the discontented conspirator, in
the well-appointed apartment, where a hideous deed of treachery is to
be plotted; or of the wavering workman--who fears he is about to
plunge into greater misery, and yet hopes the realisation of the false
promises made him--standing, still uncertain, to listen to the voice
of the tempting instigator to rebellion under the gas lamp at the
obscure street corner, on a drizzling night. All these are sketches
connected with the past ones of the national workshops, and with those
to come; they lead on to the last in the dark series, irresistibly,
inevitably: but as most of them must necessarily be fancy sketches,
and not "taken from the life," let them be turned over hurriedly with
but a glance.
And those that follow--what a confused mass of startling subjects they
offer! See here! the bands of united men assembling by night, and
marching silently through the sleeping streets; then shouting and
tossing up their arms in open defiance; then the rising barricades,
all bristling with bayonets; then the national guards and troops
pouring through the streets; the smoke of the firing; the mass of
uniforms mounting the barricades; the tottering falling men; the
confusion; the bodies strewn hither and thither, of wounded and dead;
the struggle, hand to hand upon the barricades, of the _blouse_ with
the uniform of the national guard,--fury and hatred between fellow
countrymen in each face; the cavalry dashing down the boulevards; the
cannon rapidly dragged along; the tottering houses battered down; and
then the biers slowly borne upon sad men's shoulders, supporting the
dying or the dead; the carts filled with corpses; the wounded, upon
straw littered down on the pavement, attended by the doctor in his
common black attire, contrasting with the pure white cap and pinners
of the _sœur de charité_; the uniforms, now smeared with blood and
blackened by smoke, mingling with the long dark dress and falling
white collar of the administering priest. See! now again, in the midst
of the carnage and uproar and smoke, the young soldier of the day, the
_Garde Mobile_, borne on the shoulders of his comrades, and waving in
his hand the banner which he has wrested with valour from the hands of
the insurgents on the barricade; and women, even in the midst of the
terror and dismay, fling down flowers from the windows upon the heads
of these young defenders of their country--the perfume of the flower
mingling with the scent of stifling powder-smoke and the rank taint of
blood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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