They remembered the boy volunteer of nineteen, the young captain of the famous infernal column, bringing to the Convention a strip of flag taken from the enemy, and winning from that great and terrible Assembly a vote pronouncing Captain Lamarque to have deserved well from his country. How splendid his military life had been through the thirty years that had passed since then!
They remembered Caprée, Calabria, the Tyrol and Wagram, where he broke the Austrian army three times; they recalled and extolled his struggles each day in Catalogne, against Wellington, who never conquered him and whom he hoped to conquer. Then, too, his political life, as a member of the Tribune, was none the less fine; his presence in all the struggles in the Chamber; his voice always raised on behalf of the honour and defence of France; his entreaties in favour of liberty when it was threatened; his cries of alarm each time he saw the Revolution compromise; ill and weak as he was up to the day he took to his bed, he never kept silence or yielded when any question of national honour arose.
When General Foy died, he at least left us Lamarque, as Miltiades left Themistocles. When General Lamarque died, he left behind him the heritage of a race of warriors which has given generals to the battlefield and tribunes to the Chamber. In spite of all the right he had to public recognition, the Government of Louis-Philippe, who only regarded General Lamarque as an enemy, and rejoiced at the fall of an enemy, only accorded to his obsequies the tribute of honour strictly due to the political and military position of a general; all the funeral arrangements were left to the pious care and to the responsibility of his friends and family.
I was made a steward by the family and had the charge of seeing that the artillery took its proper place behind the funeral car. This honour was, in a way, a souvenir which the dead bequeathed to the living. In common with General Foy and General La Fayette, General Lamarque had been very friendly to me, due, indeed, more to memory of my father than to my own personal valour. But still, when he knew, about the close of 1830, that I had returned from la Vendée, where I had been sent by General La Fayette, he begged me to go and see him. We talked for long of the Vendée as he had known it in 1815, when he was going on a mission from a fresh government; I told him all I thought about it, namely, that, some day or other, it threatened to rise in revolt. Every word of mine answered to some foresight of his own. I traced out my journey for him with blackheaded pins and indicated the probable places where there would be gatherings. He left for Nantes on the following day. But they did not let him reach his destination; at Angers he was stopped by an order recalling him.
We believe this measure was the result of those niggardly schemes which the ministry of Casimir Périer labelled with the title of wide political vision, and I believe I am not wrong in applying to him the same explanation that I did not hesitate to apply to Louis-Philippe, after the interview I had the honour to have with him upon our return from Vendée.
The revolution of 1830 had been so sudden that, for a moment, we Republicans thought it was complete; the report of its arms and its cries of liberty had reverberated throughout Belgium, Italy and Poland; three nations rose and cried, "France, come to our aid!" An appeal like this France always listens to, and General La Fayette replied in the name of France. The most lively and popular sympathy had, moreover, burst forth in our towns and countrysides in favour of revolutions carried out on our own lines; partial and distant eruptions of that great volcano whose crater is in Paris, and which seems at times extinct, like Etna, but, as deceptive as Etna, is always burning! Shouts of "Vivent l'Italie, la Belgique et la Pologne!" filled our streets and entered everywhere through the windows and doors of royal and ministerial palaces. It was scarcely three months after the Revolution; at that period all still glowed with the sun of the Three Days, the grand voice of the people was still listened to, and the Government only had to promise through General La Fayette, as we have said above, for the nations of Belgium, Italy and Poland to be kept from perishing. And we heard the cries of joy of these foreign patriots in less than four months change to cries of distress. But what other could we expect? Let them succour Italy by sending one of the old generals, who would have shown them the way to make a new army, and Poland by diverting the Czar's plans, by inciting—an easy task for us—Turkey on one side and Persia on the other. Thus caught in a triangle of fire, we should leave Russia to contend, and we should divide between our two neighbour nations the most effective aid of our presence and of our arms. The people, true and profound of instinct, would thus feel, without being able to account for the means, the three probable results, and they would receive with shouts of joy the proclamation of the ministerial system of nonintervention, and the royal promise that the Polish nationality should not perish.
Advanced as were the ministers of Louis-Philippe's kingdom, they must either go to war or forswear it: by making war, they would get into trouble with kings; by forswearing it, they would get into trouble with the people. One way only remained: to prove to the country that it had too much to do in respect of its own affairs to busy itself in meddling with those of others; it was like giving to France an internal fever, as we have already said; through being taken up with its own sufferings it would have more sympathy for those of others. A small civil war in la Vendée would help its outlook wonderfully. It was therefore necessary to send far out of that country, upon which they wished to experiment, all strong men who might compromise movements from their beginnings, and all shrewd men who might guess the real cause of those movements.
Now, Lamarque was both a strong man and a far-seeing one; so they did not give him time to arrive on the scene of civil war. It was to these circumstances I owed the honour of coming in contact with General Lamarque and of not being forgotten by the family at the time of rendering the last honours to the conqueror of Caprée. I went to tell my friends Bastide and Godefroy Cavaignac of my appointment, and asked them if they had arranged anything for the morrow. They had a meeting at Étienne Arago's for the same evening, who, as I have previously said, was lieutenant in the 12th Legion of Artillery, and who, in case of a triumphant insurrection, was designed by a secret organisation to be mayor of the first arrondissement; the son of the noted barrister Bernard (of Rennes), was his associate. Arago lived in Bernard's house, which was at the corner of the place and rue des Pyramides. Nothing was settled at this meeting; no sort of plan was drawn up or scheme fixed upon: each one was left to his own devices to act according to circumstances. Nevertheless, the detachment of artillery commanded for the funeral cortège appeared armed at the house of mourning and provided themselves with cartridges.
On 5 June, the day fixed for the funeral, I went at eight in the morning to the general's house, in the faubourg Saint-Honoré. In my capacity as steward I had no rifle, nor, consequently, any cartridges. There were already, by eight o'clock, over three thousand persons in front of the house. I saw a group of young people who were preparing a kind of ammunition-waggon with ropes. I went up to them and asked them what they were busy with. "They were arranging the ropes," they replied, "with which to draw the funeral car." At the same time, they informed me that General Lamarque's body was lying in state in his sleeping-room and that people were defiling past the bed of state. I went and put myself in the queue and filed past in my turn. The general in full uniform was laid on his bed, with his gloved-hand on his bare sword; he had a fine head, and his dignity was increased by the majesty of death. Those who passed by did so in silence and veneration, stooping as they reached the foot of the bed and sprinkling holy water on the corpse with a bough of laurel. I passed by as the rest did and went back into the street again. I was extremely weak from the effect of the cholera, I had lost all my appetite and scarcely ate an ounce of bread a day. The day promised to be a fatiguing one: so I went into my friend Hiraux's, whose café was, as we know, at the corner of the rues Royale and Saint-Honoré, and I waited until the time for departure, trying to take a cup of chocolate. At eleven, a rolling of drums called me to my post. They had just brought down the coffin under the great gate, shrouded with black. All the various elements which go to the formation of a funeral procession rolled along the rue and faubourg Saint Honoré—National Guards, workmen, artillerymen, students, old soldiers, refugees of all countries, citizens from every town; leaving, like a twin lake, their waves rolling across the place de la Madeleine and the place Louis XV. At the roll of the drums, all this crowd disentangled itself and every one rallied round his own leader, flag and banner. Many only had laurel or oak branches for banners and flags. All this passed before the eyes of the four squadrons of carabiniers who occupied the place Louis XV. The 12th Light Infantry waited at the other end of Paris on the very place de la Bastille. The Municipal Guard, on its side, was placed at intervals along the route which extended from the Préfecture de Police to the Panthéon. A detachment of the same guard protected the Jardin des Plantes. A squadron of dragoons covered the place de Grève with a battalion of the 3rd Light. Finally, a detachment of soldiers of the same troop stood ready to mount their horses at the Célestins barracks. The remaining troops were confined in their respective barracks, and orders were given that regiments from Rueil, Saint-Denis and Courbevoie should be sent if needed.
There were then in Paris, on the morning of that terrible day, nearly eighteen thousand men of the line and light infantry; four thousand four hundred cavalry; two thousand of the garde municipale infantry and cavalry. Nearly eighty thousand men in all. We had been told of this increase of troops—for we had friends even in the War Office—an increase due indisputably to the circumstances under which they found themselves; they had added that the Government only waited an excuse for showing its strength; this meant that, instead of fearing a riot, they desired one. But there was so much ardour in the young political head which constituted the Republican party, that directly the match touched the flint, the spark flashed forth which was to fire the powder-magazine, the very powder-magazine which was to blow us all up. We were congregated on the place Louis XV. with all the heads of the secret societies. Only one of these societies, the Société Gauloise, was in favour of fighting. The previous day, the Société des Amis du peuple had met in the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle and had decided, as we had done on our part, that firing was not to be begun, but that it should be answered if it were begun by the soldiers. As will be seen it needed only a single shot to lead to a general slaughter.