He was successively chimney-sweep, bricklayer, groom, coal-heaver, sawyer, clerk, and street-hawker. His tribute to the Paris workingmen, with whom he was thus intimately thrown, is especially fine:—
“They were mostly illiterate, but reasoned better than I. They had studied the great, practical book of suffering, the pages of which are printed in characters of blood and tears. It was these poor pariahs who initiated me into the great anarchistic ideal, and who, out of the midst of their misery, expounded to me how society could be tranquil and happy under the régime of essential justice.
“How noble they appeared to me, these men whom the bourgeois loaded with insults after having sucked their blood!
“The Paroles d’un Révolté of Kropotkine made a fervent anarchist of me, and it was only then that I began to perceive men and things in their true light.”
The outrages inflicted by the Clichy police on Dardare, Decamp, and Léveillé, who had defended their right to carry the black flag, revolvers in hand, and the cavalier treatment of these same men by the personages of the court before which they were summoned, were the probable provocations for the unsuccessful attempt,[33] of which Ravachol was suspected to be the author, on the Clichy station-house and for the explosions of the rue de Clichy and the Boulevard St. Germain for which he was condemned.
“Manacled and bleeding,” wrote Zo d’Axa at the time in L’Endehors, “the three men were landed in the station-house. Their respite was not long. The officers were not slow to pay the prisoners a visit, and this is what they brought with them: kicks for shin-bones, pummellings for panting chests, blows of revolver butts for aching heads. It was the dance of the vanquished. They mauled the poor fellows with inexorable malice and ignoble ingenuity. The police band tortured with ferocious joy.
“When they stopped, it was from weariness and only to reopen the séance half an hour later. So passed the day of the arrest and other subsequent days.
“Their eyes blackened, their heads swollen and unrecognisable, their bodies bruised, their spirits broken, the poor fellows had no more force to resist. They remained inert under poundings as under the lash of insult. Their wounds festered, and they were refused water to wash the sores. A month after the arrest the bullet that might have given him gangrene had not been extracted from the leg of Léveillé.”
Some allowance should be made in the above account for the evident partisan spirit of Zo d’Axa. But there is plenty of unbiased evidence to demonstrate the culpability of the police in this affair and to explain the epidemic of overt acts that came after it.