A mason, returning home after his day's work, left a small parcel
on the bench near the bridge of Austerlitz. It was carried to the
guard-house and opened, and from it were taken two printed dialogues
signed "Lahautière," a song called "Workmen, combine!" and a tin box
full of cartridges. A workman drinking with his comrade bade him feel
how hot he was; and the other noticed a pistol under his jacket. In a
ditch on the boulevard between Père Lachaise and the Barrière du Trône,
some children, playing at the most deserted spot, discovered under a
heap of rubbish a bag containing a bullet mould, a mandrel for making
cartridges, a pouch in which there were some grains of gunpowder, and
an iron ladle on which were evident signs of melted lead. Some police
agents suddenly entering at five A.M. the room of one Pardon, who was
at a later date a sectionist belonging to the Barricade Merry section,
found him sitting on his bed with cartridges in his hand, which he
was in the act of making. At the hour when workmen are generally
resting, two men were noticed to meet between the Picpus and Charenton
barrières, in a lane running between two walls. One took a pistol from
under his blouse, which he handed to the other; as he gave it him he
noticed that the perspiration on his chest had dampened the gunpowder,
he therefore filled the pan afresh, and the two men thereupon parted.
A man of the name of Gallas, afterwards killed in the April affair in
the Rue Beaubourg, used to boast that he had at home seven hundred
cartridges and twenty-four gun flints. One day the Government received
information that arms and two hundred thousand cartridges had just been
distributed in the faubourg, and the next week thirty thousand more
cartridges were given out. The remarkable thing was that the police
could not seize any of them; but an intercepted letter stated: "The day
is not far distant when eighty thousand patriots will be under arms in
four hours."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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