CHAPTER LVIII.

THE FIRST ROLL OF THUNDER.

The time had come.

One night the streets of Paris were darkened by crowds of silent, stern men whose eager faces looked sinister in the lamplight, as they turned invariably toward the Place do Grève. The men moved swiftly on in comparative silence; but wherever they paused a warehouse was broken open, and everything of iron or steel it contained taken therefrom, though all other articles were scrupulously left untouched.

Women, too, came out of their domicils, and swelled the stream that poured into the Place de Grève. Each carried some burden—a loaf of bread, a bar of rusty iron, or a ponderous fire-shovel, from her own hearthstone. Before midnight the Place de Grève, and the adjoining streets broke into a blaze. Anvils and forges in full blast seemed to start out of the very earth, lighting up all the grand outlines of the Hotel de Ville and the great crowds of men and women that swarmed around it, with gleams of light thrown against deep, deep shadows, that made the whole scene terrible. To this was added the sharp ring of iron against steel, the roll of wheels bringing in heavy loads of plunder, the crash of hammers thundering to each other, and the awful hum and swell of angry voices in suppression.

Men toiled that night like demons. Many who had thought themselves too feeble and famished for exertion, now wrangled with each other for a chance of work at the forges. Pale, hungry faces grew stern as death in the lurid light of the fire; while demagogues from the clubs, and Bohemians of the press, passed in and out of the crowd with inflammatory words, which kept the wild enthusiasm at a white heat.

Women crowded in, some with their arms bare to the shoulders, unloading wagons like men; others enforcing the fiery ardor of the demagogues with passionate appeals, and hurling bitter taunts on those who stood aloof. The market women, having broken up their stock for the next day, distributed stores of provisions to the workmen, and fed the hungry with their own hands. Some even seized upon the tools, and began to forge instruments of slaughter with the skill and energy of men; some mounted on piles of arms already forged, and harangued the men as they worked. Among these appeared Madame Gosner, the martyr of the day, whose presence was everywhere heralded with tumults of sympathy and applause.

“Not for my sake,” she cried, mounting a wagon in which crude metal had been brought to the forges, where she stood like some Roman matron in a victorious car, “not for my sake, nor for the redemption of one man do I urge you forward——”

Here the impassioned orator was interrupted by shouts from the women, and wilder demonstrations from the men, who paused in their work to listen, and snatch a mouthful of bread from the hands of such women as were giving food to the hungry, that no man’s strength need fail till his work was done.

“Let no man stop his work that my voice may be heard,” continued Madame Gosner. “God will give strength to my lungs, and you shall hear me, though ten thousand anvils rang out such glorious music as this at a single crash. In this sound I hear the downfall of that odious prison, where kings deal with their victims like incarnate demons, chaining them to walls like beasts of the fields—burying them alive in eternal darkness—rendering them up to worms and reptiles while yet alive.

“Citizens, this is not the work of one generation, but of many. Kings and Queens of France have, for generations, held those accursed ramparts of stones as a monument of their greatness, dear to royalty as the throne itself. It is an awful contrast which makes the luxury of their palaces more perfect. Without misery for the people, courts and kings would never feel how much they are above us. In order to know how high they are, it is their eternal effort to debase us. We are the beasts of burden that drag forward their triumphal chariots; creatures to starve while they riot. By our labor they are fed; by our toil they are exalted, till pride becomes arrogance, and their very laws are made to protect them and degrade us.

“The wealth of a nation lies in its labor. Where has that gone which our forefathers created by the strength of their hands? Look for it in the enormous estates which cover France from border to shore. Has one of them descended to the laborers, whose toil wrested them from the wilderness? Who among you owns a rood of land? Not one. If to you belongs the sledges you wield, and the spades with which you dig, it is all that they will give you out of a thousand years of hard toil, rendered with reckless generosity to these pampered lordlings. What are these creatures, after all, but things of our own creation? Their palaces, their estates, their jewels belong to us, and are made the instruments of our debasement. It has taken a thousand years to consolidate the power that crushes us. Men and women of France, let us unite, and a single year shall tear it down.

“I have a husband in one of those hideous dungeons; for years and years they have buried him from my sight. When we parted, he took me in his arms, and promised with many a farewell kiss, to return within the month. My hair was bright with the gloss of youth then—look at it now; I have not seen his face since then. But I do not plead for him alone; other women have husbands to lose—other women, for ages on ages have been made widows, knowing their husbands living, but buried far from the light of day, as mine is. It is for them I plead and implore you to shatter these enormous walls, and let God’s free sunshine into those hideous vaults.

“Every stone of those blackened towers is cemented with blood and saturated with groans. I ask you to sweep an awful plague spot from the bosom of France. Let us tear it away, stone by stone—uproot it, rock by rock; break through those rugged walls, and choke up the festering moat with their ruins. Citizens, the strong arms of your fathers built this prison, which your kings have turned into a place of torment that fiends would shrink from. Are your arms weaker than theirs? What they built have not you the strength to pull down, or shall the women of France show you the way?”

A yell went up from that portion of the crowd which surrounded Gosner’s wife, for there the women of Paris had assembled in the greatest numbers.

“Give us arms—give us arms, and we will take the prison ourselves,” shrieked the infuriated women. “There are plenty of arms at the Hôtel des Invalides—will the men of France get them for us? or shall we storm the place ourselves?”

These women were answered with one simultaneous shout.

“To the Invalides! to the Invalides!”

A huge mass of the people left the Place de Grève, shouting this cry. In half an hour they were thundering at the gates of the Invalides.

The governor would have temporized, but some one cried out,

“He only wants time to defeat us!”

That cry was enough to set the whole crowd in motion. They leaped the ditches, disarmed the sentinels, and plunged headlong into the vaults below where the arms were stored. The confusion was fearful. These men crowded on each other in masses, the torches were extinguished, the weak were trampled down by the strong, but through it all twenty thousand muskets and some pieces of cannon were taken into the streets of Paris.