Towards the end of April, everything had become aggravated. The fermentation entered the boiling state. Ever since 1830, petty partial revolts had been going on here and there, quickly suppressed, but ever bursting forth afresh, the sign of a vast underlying conflagration. Something terrible was in preparation. France kept an eye on Paris; Paris kept an eye on the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The wine-shops of the Rue de Charonne were grave and stormy. There the government was called in question. Workingmen swore to hasten into the street at the first cry of alarm and to fight without counting the number of the enemy. Then a man in the corner assumed a sonorous tone: You understand. You have sworn. In the tap-rooms, subversive pamphlets were read. One workman wanted ten sous from each of three hundred for powder and shot. Another did not sleep at night, because he made cartridges all night. From time to time, men of bourgeois appearance, and in good coats, came and caused embarrassment, shook hands with the most important, and never stayed more than ten minutes. The plot is ripe, the matter is arranged. A man would enter a shop, drink, and go his way with the remark: Wine-merchant, the revolution will pay what is due to you. At a fencing-master's in the Rue de Cotte, the buttons were removed from the foils. The indefinite things which were brewing acquired a strange notoriety. A woman sweeping her doorsteps said to another woman that a strong force had long been busy making cartridges.
Other deeds came into the open street. A man with an Italian accent mounted a stone post and read a document that seemed to emanate from an occult power. On the day when we cease to suit you, break us, but up to that day, help us to march on. All this in broad daylight. A passer-by shouted that he was a Babouvist, and an artisan cut him short: Silence, citizen spy. At nightfall, a well-dressed man by the canal told a workingman that he was an agent of the committee, that an eye was fixed on him, and that they should meet again soon. The police collected dialogues. Who governs us? Philippe. No, it is the bourgeoisie. Four men crouching in a ditch spoke of preventing someone from walking about Paris any more. Who was the he? Menacing obscurity. The principal leaders held themselves apart. A man accused later would say he knew of none and recognised none. Then paper began to appear. A carpenter nailing boards in the Rue de Reuilly found a torn letter about guns, then a list headed Q C D E: learn this by heart, then tear it up. Only later did the four letters give up quinturions, centurions, decurions, scouts, and a date: the 15th of April, 1832. A third paper looked like the sections of a society of rights, with names and dwellings of chiefs. It should be added that the foundation of that society seems to have been later than the find. Perhaps this was only a rough draft.
Still, material facts began to make their appearance. In a dealer's house, seven sheets enclosed twenty-six squares folded as cartridges, and a card with a powder recipe; the drawer exhaled a strong smell of powder. A mason left a tin box of cartridges on a bench near the bridge of Austerlitz. Children playing in a ditch found a bullet-mould and a pot with traces of melted lead. At five in the morning the police found a man standing near his bed, holding the cartridges he was in the act of preparing. The government received warning that hundreds of thousands of cartridges had been distributed in the faubourg, and the police were not able to seize a single one. All this fermentation was public, one might almost say tranquil. The bourgeois talked peaceably to the labouring classes of what was in preparation. How is the rising coming along? in the same tone in which they would have said, How is your wife? A furniture-dealer asked when the attack would be made. Another offered his gun. The network of secret societies began to spread. From associations that were at once public and secret sprang others that survived even a court that pronounced their dissolution. Impatient men broke away and hastened ahead. A legitimist affiliation stirred among them and was repudiated. In Paris the schools were no less moved than the faubourgs. The Society of the Friends of the A B C, which the reader has already seen in the Café Musain, affiliated outward and also met, as secretly, at a wine-shop called Corinthe. The army was mined at the same time as the population.
The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, more than any other group, accentuated this situation and made it felt. That was the sore point. This old faubourg, peopled like an ant-hill, laborious, courageous, and angry as a hive of bees, was quivering with expectation and with the desire for a tumult. Everything was in agitation there, without any interruption of the regular work. In times of revolution misery is both cause and effect. The blow which it deals rebounds upon it. This population, always ready to fly to arms, prompt to explode, seemed to be only awaiting the fall of a spark. Whenever certain sparks float on the horizon, chased by the wind of events, it is impossible not to think of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and of the formidable chance which has placed at the very gates of Paris that powder-house of suffering and ideas. In the wine-shops people grow intoxicated more on words than on wine. A prophetic spirit circulates there. The cabarets resemble those taverns on the Aventine that communicated with the Sibyl, where was drunk what Ennius calls the sibylline wine. The faubourg is a reservoir of people. Revolutionary agitations create fissures there, through which trickles the popular sovereignty. In '93 there leaped forth from it now savage legions, now heroic bands. They wanted an end to oppression, work for men, instruction for the child, bread for all. They were savages, yes; but the savages of civilization. They demanded light with the mask of night. Facing them are other men, smiling, embroidered, who insist gently on the preservation of the past, of the sword, the stake, and the scaffold. If we were forced to choose between the barbarians of civilization and the civilized men of barbarism, we should choose the barbarians. But, thank Heaven, still another choice is possible. Neither despotism nor terrorism. We desire progress with a gentle slope. God takes care of that. God's whole policy consists in rendering slopes less steep.
