Men climbed upon posts, waved their hats and cried out to Baude—
"You may rely on us—you have our addresses. We will be witnesses for you. Au revoir! au revoir!"
A reinforcement of police seen coming from the direction of the Palais-Royal completed the clearing of the street. But what did that matter? The moral victory remained with the Opposition, and Baude had played as great a part as any ghostly Revolutionist of 1789.
Carrel and I left the rue de Richelieu and went to the National offices. The National had scarcely been in existence a year then; it had been started by Thiers, Carrel and the Abbé Louis, at the château de Rochecottes, at the feet of Madame de Dino, under the eye of M. de Talleyrand. The Duc d'Orléans, who had lent the necessary funds, paid, as it were, for the nursing of this infant Hercules, which, eighteen years later, was to seize him round his waist and suffocate him. These offices were situated in the rue Neuve-Saint-Marc, at the corner of the place des Italiens. We found it a hotbed of news. The evening before one of the editors had come in, out of spirits and broken down: he had been scouring the poorest quarters, which are always the easiest to stir up, and, shaking his head, he had pronounced these discouraging words:—
"The people will not be moved!"
And when we entered the National offices at two o'clock the people were still quiet; but one could feel that kind of shiver of excitement in the air which made people hurry in their walk and grow paler, they knew not why; like the deep, instinctive terror felt by animals at the approach of an earthquake.
From whence arose this shuddering, which was but yet, as it were, upon the surface of society? It is easy to make a guess. The motion of M. Thiers, which had borne forty-five signatures at the foot of the journalists' protest (it had been published in the Globe, the National, and the Temps, and a hundred thousand copies had, perhaps, been printed and distributed in the streets), this motion, we say, had compromised forty-five persons. Now, these forty-five individuals made up a compact body working upon the masses, and each also was a separate force, working upon individual members of society. Each signature was the centre of a more or less wide circumference of friends, employés, clerks, workmen, compositors, journeymen and printers' devils. Each one stirred up his own particular circle, and each individual member of this circle, however humble, was himself an agent and used his influence on his subordinates; therefore, as soon as the impulse was given, it was communicated from great centres to small, the wheels began to turn, and one felt society tremble under the throbbing of an invisible machine, almost as one feels a windmill quiver from the revolution of its sails or a steamboat from the beating of its paddles. Carrel was invited to three different meetings, all for the purpose of organising opposition. One was purely of a Liberal character, bordering on Republicanism, and was held in the rue Saint-Honoré in the house of the chemist Cadet de Gassicourt; the principal members were Thiers, Charles Teste, Anfous, Chevalier, Bastide, Cauchois-Lemaire and Dupont; at this one they discussed a motion as to creating a committee of resistance in every arrondissement (ward), with power to put itself into direct communication with the deputies. The second was Bonapartist, and was held at the house of Colonel Gourgaud. It was chiefly composed, first and foremost, of the master of the house, then of Colonels Dumoulin, Dufays and Plavet-Gaubet, and of Commandant Bacheville. Their object was to try and promote the affairs of Napoleon II., but, as all these men were more men of action than of thought, nothing was settled, and they fixed another meeting for the next day at the place des Petits-Pères. The third meeting took place in the Globe offices and was composed of Pierre Leroux, Guizard, Dejean, Paulin and Rémusat, and of several persons who had nothing to do with the staff of the paper. Here, the most conflicting counsels were put forth: some wanted to appeal to arms on the morrow, others were horrified at the pace at which, as soon as any movement is started, it descends, in spite of everything, down the path that leads to revolution.
M. de Rémusat was one of the scared.
He exclaimed, in despairing tones, "Where are you going? Where are you urging us? It must on no account lead us to revolution—that is not what we desire: legal resistance, well and good—but nothing beyond."
Of course, this meeting did not decide on a course of action any more than the others, unless it drove M. de Rémusat to his bed with the fever which seized him afterwards.