“Jeu de Siam."33 One drew a pistol from beneath his blouse and handed it to the other.
As he was handing it to him, he noticed that the perspiration of his chest had made the powder damp.
He primed the pistol and added more powder to what was already in the pan.
Then the two men parted.
A certain Gallais, afterwards killed in the Rue Beaubourg in the affair of April, boasted of having in his house seven hundred cartridges and twenty-four flints.
The government one day received a warning that arms and two hundred thousand cartridges had just been distributed in the faubourg.
On the following week thirty thousand cartridges were distributed.
The remarkable point about it was, that the police were not able to seize a single one.
An intercepted letter read:
“The day is not far distant when, within four hours by the clock, eighty thousand patriots will be under arms.”
All this fermentation was public, one might almost say tranquil.
The approaching insurrection was preparing its storm calmly in the face of the government.
No singularity was lacking to this still subterranean crisis, which was already perceptible.
The bourgeois talked peaceably to the working-classes of what was in preparation.
They said:
“How is the rising coming along?” in the same tone in which they would have said:
“How is your wife?”
A furniture-dealer, of the Rue Moreau, inquired:
“Well, when are you going to make the attack?”
Another shop-keeper said:—
“The attack will be made soon.” “I know it.
A month ago, there were fifteen thousand of you, now there are twenty-five thousand.”
He offered his gun, and a neighbor offered a small pistol which he was willing to sell for seven francs.
Moreover, the revolutionary fever was growing.
Not a point in Paris nor in France was exempt from it.
The artery was beating everywhere.
Like those membranes which arise from certain inflammations and form in the human body, the network of secret societies began to spread all over the country.
From the associations of the Friends of the People, which was at the same time public and secret, sprang the Society of the Rights of Man, which also dated from one of the orders of the day: Pluviose, Year 40 of the republican era, which was destined to survive even the mandate of the Court of Assizes which pronounced its dissolution, and which did not hesitate to bestow on its sections significant names like the following:—
Pikes.
Tocsin.
Signal cannon.
Phrygian cap.
January 21.
The beggars.
The vagabonds. Forward march.
Robespierre.
Level.
Ca Ira.
The Society of the Rights of Man engendered the Society of Action.
These were impatient individuals who broke away and hastened ahead.
Other associations sought to recruit themselves from the great mother societies.
The members of sections complained that they were torn asunder.
Thus, the Gallic Society, and the committee of organization of the Municipalities.
Thus the associations for the liberty of the press, for individual liberty, for the instruction of the people against indirect taxes.
Then the Society of Equal Workingmen which was divided into three fractions, the levellers, the communists, the reformers.
Then the Army of the Bastilles, a sort of cohort organized on a military footing, four men commanded by a corporal, ten by a sergeant, twenty by a sub-lieutenant, forty by a lieutenant; there were never more than five men who knew each other.
Creation where precaution is combined with audacity and which seemed stamped with the genius of Venice.
The central committee, which was at the head, had two arms, the Society of Action, and the Army of the Bastilles.
A legitimist association, the Chevaliers of Fidelity, stirred about among these the republican affiliations.
It was denounced and repudiated there.