Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK TENTH THE 5TH OF JUNE 1832 CHAPTER III A BURIAL AN OCCASION TO BE BORN AGAIN

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In the spring of 1832, although the cholera had been chilling all minds for the last
three months and had cast over their agitation an indescribable and gloomy pacification,
Paris had already long been ripe for commotion. As we have said, the great city resembles
a piece of artillery; when it is loaded, it suffices for a spark to fall, and the shot is
discharged.In June, 1832, the spark was the death of General Lamarque.
Lamarque was a man of renown and of action. He had had in succession, under the Empire
and under the Restoration, the sorts of bravery requisite for the two epochs, the bravery
of the battle-field and the bravery of the tribune. He was as eloquent as he had been
valiant; a sword was discernible in his speech. Like Foy, his predecessor, after upholding
the command, he upheld liberty; he sat between the left and the extreme left, beloved of
the people because he accepted the chances of the future, beloved of the populace because
he had served the Emperor well; he was, in company with Comtes Gerard and Drouet, one of
Napoleon's marshals in petto. The treaties of 1815 removed him as a personal offence. He
hated Wellington with a downright hatred which pleased the multitude; and, for seventeen
years, he majestically preserved the sadness of Waterloo, paying hardly any attention to
intervening events. In his death agony, at his last hour, he clasped to his breast a sword
which had been presented to him by the officers of the Hundred Days. Napoleon had died
uttering the word army, Lamarque uttering the word country.
His death, which was expected, was dreaded by the people as a loss, and by the
government as an occasion. This death was an affliction. Like everything that is bitter,
affliction may turn to revolt. This is what took place.
On the preceding evening, and on the morning of the 5th of June, the day appointed for
Lamarque's burial, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which the procession was to touch at,
assumed a formidable aspect. This tumultuous network of streets was filled with rumors.
They armed themselves as best they might. Joiners carried off door-weights of their
establishment "to break down doors." One of them had made himself a dagger of a
stocking-weaver's hook by breaking off the hook and sharpening the stump. Another, who was
in a fever "to attack," slept wholly dressed for three days. A carpenter named
Lombier met a comrade, who asked him: "Whither are you going?" "Eh! well, I
have no weapons." "What then?" "I'm going to my timber-yard to get my
compasses." "What for?" "I don't know," said Lombier. A certain
Jacqueline, an expeditious man, accosted some passing artisans: "Come here,
you!" He treated them to ten sous' worth of wine and said: "Have you work?"
"No." "Go to Filspierre, between the Barriere Charonne and the Barriere
Montreuil, and you will find work." At Filspierre's they found cartridges and arms.
Certain well-known leaders were going the rounds, that is to say,running from one house to
another, to collect their men. At Barthelemy's, near the Barriere du Trone, at Capel's,
near the Petit-Chapeau, the drinkers accosted each other with a grave air. They were heard
to say: "Have you your pistol?" "Under my blouse." "And
you?" "Under my shirt." In the Rue Traversiere, in front of the Bland
workshop, and in the yard of the Maison-Brulee, in front of tool-maker Bernier's, groups
whispered together. Among them was observed a certain Mavot, who never remained more than
a week in one shop, as the masters always discharged him "because they were obliged
to dispute with him every day." Mavot was killed on the following day at the
barricade of the Rue Menilmontant. Pretot, who was destined to perish also in the
struggle, seconded Mavot, and to the question: "What is your object?" he
replied: "Insurrection." Workmen assembled at the corner of the Rue de Bercy,
waited for a certain Lemarin, the revolutionary agent for the Faubourg Saint-Marceau.
Watchwords were exchanged almost publicly.
On the 5th of June, accordingly, a day of mingled rain and sun, General Lamarque's
funeral procession traversed Paris with official military pomp, somewhat augmented through
precaution. Two battalions,with draped drums and reversed arms, ten thousand National
Guards, with their swords at their sides, escorted the coffin. The hearse was drawn by
young men. The officers of the Invalides came immediately behind it, bearing laurel
branches. Then came an innumerable, strange, agitated multitude, the sectionaries of the
Friends of the People, the Law School, the Medical School, refugees of all nationalities,
and Spanish, Italian, German, and Polish flags, tricolored horizontal banners, every
possible sort of banner, children waving green boughs, stone-cutters and carpenters who
were on strike at the moment, printers who were recognizable by their paper caps, marching
two by two, three by three, uttering cries, nearly all of them brandishing sticks, some
brandishing sabres, without order and yet with a single soul, now a tumultuous rout, again
a column. Squads chose themselves leaders; a man armed with a pair of pistols in full
view, seemed to pass the host in review, and the files separated before him. On the side
alleys of the boulevards, in the branches of the trees, on balconies, in windows, on the
roofs, swarmed the heads of men, women, and children; all eyes were filled with anxiety.
An armed throng was passing, and a terrified throng looked on.
The Government, on its side, was taking observations. It observed with its hand on its
sword. Four squadrons of carabineers could be seen in the Place Louis XV. In their
saddles, with their trumpets at their head, cartridge-boxes filled and muskets loaded, all
in readiness to march; in the Latin country and at the Jardin des Plantes, the Municipal
Guard echelonned from street to street; at the Halle-aux-Vins, a squadron of dragoons; at
the Greve half of the 12th Light Infantry, the other half being at the Bastille;the 6th
Dragoons at the Celestins; and the courtyard of the Louvre full of artillery. The
remainder of the troops were confined to their barracks, without reckoning the regiments
of the environs of Paris. Power being uneasy, held suspended over the menacing multitude
twenty-four thousand soldiers in the city and thirty thousand in the banlieue.
Divers reports were in circulation in the cortege. Legitimist tricks were hinted at;
they spoke of the Duc de Reichstadt, whom God had marked out for death at that very moment
when the populace were designating him for the Empire. One personage, whose name has
remained unknown, announced that at a given hour two overseers who had been won over,
would throw open the doors of a factory of arms to the people. That which predominated on
the uncovered brows of the majority of those present was enthusiasm mingled with
dejection. Here and there, also, in that multitude given over to such violent but noble
emotions, there were visible genuine visages of criminals and ignoble mouths which said:
"Let us plunder!" There are certain agitations which stir up the bottoms of
marshes and make clouds of mud rise through the water. A phenomenon to which "well
drilled" policemen are no strangers.
The procession proceeded, with feverish slowness, from the house of the deceased, by
way of the boulevards as far as the Bastille. It rained from time to time; the rain
mattered nothing to that throng. Many incidents, the coffin borne round the Vendome
column, stones thrown at the Duc de Fitz-James, who was seen on a balcony with his hat on
his head, the Gallic cock torn from a popular flag and dragged in the mire, a policeman
wounded with a blow from a sword at the Porte Saint-Martin, an officer of the 12th Light
Infantry saying aloud:"I am a Republican," the Polytechnic School coming up
unexpectedly against orders to remain at home, the shouts of: "Long live the
Polytechnique! Long live the Republic!" marked the passage of the funeral train. At
the Bastille, long files of curious and formidable people who descended from the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine, effected a junction with the procession, and a certain terrible seething
began to agitate the throng. One man was heard to say to another: "Do you see that
fellow with a red beard, he's the one who will give the word when we are to fire." It
appears that this red beard was present, at another riot, the Quenisset affair, entrusted
with this same function.
The hearse passed the Bastille, traversed the small bridge, and reached the esplanade
of the bridge of Austerlitz. There it halted. The crowd, surveyed at that moment with a
bird'seye view, would have presented the aspect of a comet whose head was on the esplanade
and whose tail spread out over the Quai Bourdon, covered the Bastille, and was prolonged
on the boulevard as far as the Porte Saint-Martin. A circle was traced around the hearse.
The vast rout held their peace. Lafayette spoke and bade Lamarque farewell. This was a
touching and august instant, all heads uncovered, all hearts beat high.
All at once, a man on horseback, clad in black, made his appearance in the middle of
the group with a red flag, others say, with a pike surmounted with a red liberty-cap.
Lafayette turned aside his head. Exelmans quitted the procession.
This red flag raised a storm, and disappeared in the midst of it. From the Boulevard
Bourdon to the bridge of Austerlitz one of those clamors which resemble billows stirred
the multitude. Two prodigious shouts went up: "Lamarque to the Pantheon!-- Lafayette
to the Town-hall!" Some young men, amid the declamations of the throng, harnessed
themselves and began to drag Lamarque in the hearse across the bridge of Austerlitz and
Lafayette in a hackney-coach along the Quai Morland.
In the crowd which surrounded and cheered Lafayette, it was noticed that a German
showed himself named Ludwig Snyder, who died a centenarian afterwards, who had also been
in the war of 1776, and who had fought at Trenton under Washington, and at Brandywine
under Lafayette.
In the meantime, the municipal cavalry on the left bank had been set in motion, and
came to bar the bridge, on the right bank the dragoons emerged from the Celestins and
deployed along the Quai Morland. The men who were dragging Lafayette suddenly caught sight
of them at the corner of the quay and shouted: "The dragoons!" The dragoons
advanced at a walk, in silence, with their pistols in their holsters, their swords in
their scabbards, their guns slung in their leather sockets, with an air of gloomy
expectation.
They halted two hundred paces from the little bridge. The carriage in which sat
Lafayette advanced to them, their ranks opened and allowed it to pass, and then closed
behind it. At that moment the dragoons and the crowd touched. The women fled in terror.
What took place during that fatal minute? No one can say. It is the dark moment when two
clouds come together. Some declare that a blast of trumpets sounding the charge was heard
in the direction of the Arsenal others that a blow from a dagger was given by a child to a
dragoon. The fact is, that three shots were suddenly discharged: the first killed Cholet,
chief of the squadron, the second killed an old deaf woman who was in the act of closing
her window, the third singed the shoulder of an officer; a woman screamed: "They are
beginning too soon!" and all at once, a squadron of dragoons which had remained in
the barracks up to this time, was seen to debouch at a gallop with bared swords, through
the Rue Bassompierre and the Boulevard Bourdon, sweeping all before them.
Then all is said, the tempest is loosed, stones rain down, a fusillade breaks forth,
many precipitate themselves to the bottom of the bank, and pass the small arm of the
Seine, now filled in, the timber-yards of the Isle Louviers, that vast citadel ready to
hand, bristle with combatants, stakes are torn up, pistol-shots fired, a barricade begun,
the young men who are thrust back pass the Austerlitz bridge with the hearse at a run, and
the municipal guard, the carabineers rush up, the dragoons ply their swords, the crowd
disperses in all directions, a rumor of war flies to all four quarters of Paris, men
shout: "To arms!" they run, tumble down, flee, resist. Wrath spreads abroad the
riot as wind spreads a fire.

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