Women waved their handkerchiefs from the open windows, crying—
"Do not fire on the people!"
There was a certain type among the men whom the soldiers were driving aside which is only to be seen at special hours of the day—the kind of men who start riots and revolutions, men whom one might style the pioneers of disorder. When the troops reached the place de la Bourse they deployed, but, as they could not cover the whole width of the square, a portion of those who were being pushed along by the soldiers overflowed on both sides and swept back after them. Now, there was near the Bourse a rickety old wooden shanty which was used as a guard-house. The regiment left about a dozen soldiers there as in a block-house and disappeared down the rue Neuve-Vivienne in the direction of the Bastille. The regiment was scarcely out of sight when some boys from the crowd came up to the soldiers who were left in the guard-house, shouting—
"Vive la Charte!"
Whilst these lads did no more than shout, the soldiers kept their patience, but stones soon followed the shoutings. A soldier, hit by a stone, fired, and a woman fell—a woman of about thirty. Cries of "Murder!" went up and, in a second, the square was emptied, lights were extinguished and shops closed. The théâtre des Nouveautés alone remained lighted and open,—they were playing la Chatte blanche,—and those inside the house had no idea what was going on outside. A small troop of about twelve men appeared, at that moment, from the rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas. It was headed by Étienne Arago and was shouting—
"Stop the play! Close the theatres! They are killing people in the streets of Paris!..."
It stumbled against the body of the woman who had been killed.
"Carry this corpse to the steps of the peristyle, so that everybody can see it," said Étienne; "I am going to have the theatre emptied."
And, as a matter of fact, the place was emptied an instant later, the stream of spectators, on coming out, spreading apart as a torrent does before a rock, so as to avoid trampling upon the body. I ran to Arago.
"What are they doing," I asked. "What has been decided?"