“Since ten o’clock that morning, from post to commissariat, the telegraph and the telephone had signalled the strange passage of the subversive animal. The order was issued: ‘Arrest the jackass!’ And now the police sergeants barred the route of the candidate.
“Near the Place St. Michel, the faithful committee of Nul was ordered by the armed force to conduct its candidate to the nearest police station. Naturally, the committee paid no attention, and kept on its way. The car crossed the Seine, and soon it halted before the Palais de Justice.
“The police, re-enforced, surrounded the white jackass, the impassive jackass. The candidate was arrested at the gate of this Palais de Justice, whence deputies, defaulters, panamistes, all the big thieves, go out free.
“In the midst of the surging crowd the car swayed as if about to capsize. The police, a brigadier at their head, had seized the shafts and donned the straps. The committee insisted no more: they helped harness the sergents de ville.
“Thus the white jackass was abandoned by his warmest partisans. Like any other vulgar politician, the animal had come to a bad end. The police towed him, authority guided his route. From this moment Nul was only an official candidate. His friends acknowledged him no more. The door of the prefecture opened wide, and the jackass entered quite as if he were entering his own stall.”
What has all this starving and self-killing and freakishness and practical joking of the Quartier Bohemians to do with revolution? Much every way.
Jules Vallès (all his life a Latin Quarter Bohemian), whom Richepin has characterised as “the most curious and the most complete of the déclassés of the pen”; of whom his intimate friend Gill said, “He would be the tenderest, the most spirituel, the most charming, and the most eloquent fellow in the world, were it not for the mania which possesses him to believe himself at ease only in the smoke of battles or the bawlings of the faubourgs”; who presented himself at the elections of 1869 as “le candidat de la misère,” and put at the head of his second volume of Jacques Vingtras (Le Bachelier), “A ceux qui nourris de Grec et de Latin sont morts de faim, je dédie ce livre,”—Jules Vallès (and who should know better than Vallès?) said, not long before the Commune was declared:—
“In this life there is a danger. Misère without a flag conducts to the misère that has a flag, and makes of the scattered réfractaires an army which counts in its ranks less sons of the people than sons of the bourgeoisie. Behold them bearing down upon us, pale, mute, emaciated, beating the charge with the bones of their martyrs upon the drum of the révoltés, and waving as a standard, at the point of a sword, the blood-stained shirt of the last of their suicides!...
“These déclassés must find places, or they will have revenge; and this is why so much absinthe runs down their throats and so much blood upon the paving-stones. They become drunkards or rebels.”
And again, in the introduction to his Réfractaires, he says, “Give me three hundred of these men, any sort of a flag, toss me down there before the regiments in a raking fire, and you shall see what short work I will make of the gunners at the head of my réfractaires!”