In less than an hour twenty-seven barricades issued from the ground
in the single quarter of the Halles; in the centre was that famous
house No. 50, which was the fortress of Jeanne and her hundred-and-six
companions, and which, flanked on one side by a barricade at St.
Merry, and on the other by a barricade in the Rue Maubuée, commanded
the three streets, Des Arcis, St. Martin, and Aubry le Boucher, the
last of which it faced. Two square barricades retreated, the one from
the Rue Montorgueil into la Grande Truanderie, the other from the Rue
Geoffroy Langevin into the Rue Sainte Avoye. This is without counting
innumerable barricades in twenty other districts of Paris, as the
Marais and the Montagne Sainte Geneviève; one in the Rue Ménilmontant,
in which a gate could be seen torn off its hinges; and another near
the little bridge of the Hôtel Dieu, made of an overthrown vehicle.
Three hundred yards from the Préfecture of Police, at the barricade
in the Rue des Ménétriers, a well-dressed man distributed money to
the artisans; at the barricade in the Rue Grenetat a horseman rode up
and handed to the man who seemed to be the chief of the barricade a
roll, which looked like money. "Here," he said, "is something to pay
the expenses,--the wine, etc." A light-haired young man, without a
cravat, went from one barricade to another, carrying the passwords; and
another, with drawn sabre and a blue forage-cap on his head, stationed
sentries. In the interior, within the barricades, the wine-shops and
cabarets were converted into guard-rooms, and the riot was managed
in accordance with the most skilful military tactics. The narrow,
uneven, winding streets, full of corners and turnings, were admirably
selected,--the vicinity of the Halles more especially, a network of
streets more tangled than a forest. The society of the Friends of the
People had, it was said, taken the direction of the insurrection in the
Sainte Avoye district, and a plan of Paris was found on the body of a
man killed in the Rue du Ponceau.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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