The History of a Crime: The Testimony of an Eye-WitnessHugo, Victor
History
The History of a Crime: The Testimony of an Eye-Witness
Hugo, Victor
France -- History -- 1789-1900
"Morning of the 4th. It looks as if the combat was suspended. Will it
burst forth again? Barricades visited by me: one at the corner of
Saint Eustache. One at the Oyster Market. One in the Rue Mauconseil.
One in the Rue Tiquetonne. One in the Rue Mandar (Rocher de Cancale).
One barring the Rue du Cadran and the Rue Montorgueil. Four closing
the Petit-Carreau. The beginning of one between the Rue des Deux
Portes and the Rue Saint Sauveur, barring the Rue Saint Denis. One,
the largest, barring the Rue Saint Denis, at the top of the Rue
Guérin-Boisseau. One barring the Rue Grenetat. One farther on in the
Rue Grenetat, barring the Rue Bourg-Labbé (in the centre an overturned
flour wagon; a good barricade). In the Rue Saint Denis one barring the
Rue de Petit-Lion-Saint-Sauveur. One barring the Rue du Grand
Hurleur, with its four corners barricaded. This barricade has already
been attacked this morning. A combatant, Massonnet, a comb-maker of
154, Rue Saint Denis, received a ball in his overcoat; Dupapet, called
'the man with the long beard,' was the last to stay on the summit of
the barricade. He was heard to cry out to the officers commanding the
attack, 'You are traitors!' He is believed to have been shot. The
troops retired--strange to say without demolishing the barricade. A
barricade is being constructed in the Rue du Renard. Some National
Guards in uniform watch its construction, but do not work on it. One
of them said to me, 'We are not against you, you are on the side of
Right.' They add that there are twelve or fifteen barricades in the
Rue Rambuteau. This morning at daybreak the cannon had fired
'steadily,' as one of them remarks, in the Rue Bourbon-Villeneuve. I
visit a powder manufactory improvised by Leguevel at a chemist's
opposite the Rue Guérin-Boisseau.
"They are constructing the barricades amicably, without angering any
one. They do what they can not to annoy the neighborhood. The combatants
of the Bourg-Labbé barricades are ankle-deep in mud on account of the
rain. It is a perfect sewer. They hesitate to ask for a truss of straw.
They lie down in the water or on the pavement.
"I saw there a young man who was ill, and who had just got up from his
bed with the fever still on him. He said to me, 'I am going to my death'
(he did so).
"In the Rue Bourbon-Villeneuve they had not even asked a mattress of the
'shopkeepers,' although, the barricade being bombarded, they needed them
to deaden the effect of the balls.
"The soldiers make bad barricades, because they make them too well. A
barricade should be tottering; when well built it is worth nothing; the
paving-stones should want equilibrium, 'so that they may roll down on
the troopers,' said a street-boy to me, 'and break their paws.' Sprains
form a part of barricade warfare.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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