“Whither are you bound, citizen?”
“Sir,” replied the workingman, “I have not the honor of your acquaintance.”
“I know you very well, however.” And the man added: “Don’t be alarmed, I am an agent of the committee.
You are suspected of not being quite faithful.
You know that if you reveal anything, there is an eye fixed on you.”
Then he shook hands with the workingman and went away, saying: “We shall meet again soon.”
The police, who were on the alert, collected singular dialogues, not only in the wine-shops, but in the street.
“Get yourself received very soon,” said a weaver to a cabinet-maker.
“Why?”
“There is going to be a shot to fire.”
Two ragged pedestrians exchanged these remarkable replies, fraught with evident Jacquerie:—
“Who governs us?”
“M. Philippe.”
“No, it is the bourgeoisie.”
The reader is mistaken if he thinks that we take the word Jacquerie in a bad sense.
The Jacques were the poor.
On another occasion two men were heard to say to each other as they passed by:
“We have a good plan of attack.”
Only the following was caught of a private conversation between four men who were crouching in a ditch of the circle of the Barriere du Trone:—
“Everything possible will be done to prevent his walking about Paris any more.”
Who was the he?
Menacing obscurity.
“The principal leaders,” as they said in the faubourg, held themselves apart.
It was supposed that they met for consultation in a wine-shop near the point Saint-Eustache.
A certain Aug—, chief of the Society aid for tailors, Rue Mondetour, had the reputation of serving as intermediary central between the leaders and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
Nevertheless, there was always a great deal of mystery about these leaders, and no certain fact can invalidate the singular arrogance of this reply made later on by a man accused before the Court of Peers:—
“Who was your leader?”
“I knew of none and I recognized none.”
There was nothing but words, transparent but vague; sometimes idle reports, rumors, hearsay.
Other indications cropped up.
A carpenter, occupied in nailing boards to a fence around the ground on which a house was in process of construction, in the Rue de Reuilly found on that plot the torn fragment of a letter on which were still legible the following lines:—
The committee must take measures to prevent recruiting in the sections for the different societies.
And, as a postscript:—
We have learned that there are guns in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonniere, No. 5 [bis], to the number of five or six thousand, in the house of a gunsmith in that court.
The section owns no arms.
What excited the carpenter and caused him to show this thing to his neighbors was the fact, that a few paces further on he picked up another paper, torn like the first, and still more significant, of which we reproduce a facsimile, because of the historical interest attaching to these strange documents:—
+——————————————————————————————+
| Q | C | D | E | Learn this list by heart.
After so doing | | | | | | you will tear it up.
The men admitted
| | | | | | will do the same when you have transmitted | | | | | | their orders to them.
| | | | | | Health and Fraternity,
| | | | | | u og a’ fe L. |
+——————————————————————————————+
It was only later on that the persons who were in the secret of this find at the time, learned the significance of those four capital letters: quinturions, centurions, decurions, eclaireurs [scouts], and the sense of the letters: u og a’ fe, which was a date, and meant April 15th, 1832.
Under each capital letter were inscribed names followed by very characteristic notes.
Thus: Q. Bannerel. 8 guns, 83 cartridges.
A safe man.—C. Boubiere.
1 pistol, 40 cartridges.—D. Rollet.
1 foil, 1 pistol, 1 pound of powder.—E. Tessier.