“An hour afterward he was dead. I went out in the night. At the first barricade I stopped and offered myself. A man examined me by the light of a lantern. ‘A child!’ he cried. I was not yet fifteen. I was very small, quite undersized. I answered: ‘A child, that’s possible; but my father was killed about two hours ago. He gave me his musket. Teach me how to use it.’ “Starting with that moment, I became what I have been always, for forty years: an insurgent! If I fought during the Commune, it was neither from compulsion nor for the thirty _sous_, it was from taste, from pleasure, from habit, from routine. “In 1830, I bore myself rather bravely at the attack on the Louvre. That gamin who--the first--climbed the iron fence under the bullets of the Swiss--that was I. I received the medal of July; but the _bourgeoisie_ gave us a king. Everything had to be done over again. I joined a secret society, I learned to mould bullets, to make powder. In short, I completed my education--and I waited. “I had to wait nearly two years. The 5th of June, 1832, at midday, before the Madeleine, I began by unhitching one of the horses from the hearse of General Lamarque. I passed the day shouting, ‘_Vive Lafayette!_’ and the night in making barricades. The next morning we were attacked by the soldiers. That afternoon towards four o’clock we were pocketed, cannonaded, fired upon with grape-shot, crushed, in the Church of St. Méry. I had a bullet and three bayonet thrusts in my body when I was picked up by the soldiers on the flag-stones of a little chapel on the right--the chapel of St. John. I used often to return to that little chapel--not to pray, I was not brought up in those ideas--but to see the trace of my blood which is still marked upon the stones. “Because of my youth, I got only ten years in prison. I was sent to Mont-Saint-Michel. That was why I didn’t take any part in the uprisings of 1834. If I had been free, I should have been fighting in the Rue Transnonian as I had fought in the Rue St. Méry. Against the government--always!--always!--always! That was the last word of my father, that was my gospel, my religion! I called that my catechism in six words. I got out of prison in 1842 and again I began to wait. “The revolution of ’48 made itself--without help. The _bourgeoisie_ were stupid and cowardly. They were neither for us nor against us. The City Guards alone defended themselves. We had a little trouble in capturing the post of the Château-d’Eau. The evening of the 24th of February I stayed three or four hours on the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville. The members of the Provisional Government one after another made speeches to us, said to us that we were ‘heroes,’ ‘noble citizens,’ ‘the first people of the world;’ that we had shaken off the yoke of tyranny. After having regaled us with these fine words, they gave us a republic which wasn’t any better than the monarchy which we had tumbled to the ground.