“Un ciel boueux taché de sang, c’était l’aurore, La vieille aurore avec ses roses de festin, Qui se levait honteuse à l’appel du destin Pour éclairer des yeux que la mort allait clore.”
Another poet intoned,—
“Que ton souffle se mêle à la création, Que la rosée de ton sacrifice mouille nos âmes stériles, Que ton exemple unique soit comme l’eau d’un seule nuage Qui fait germer toutes les plantes dans la forêt!”
A ragged snail-gatherer led the crowd to the spot (a hollow against the wall) where a basket of the clotted blood that had flowed from the severed head had been hidden. Men, women, and children knotted lumps of the ensanguined sawdust in their handkerchiefs and besmeared their hands.
A fierce handbill, “A Carnot le Tueur,” was distributed broadcast. Two red flags were planted on the grave, and a black flag was unfurled, bearing the inscription, “Vive la Mort!”
On every anniversary of Vaillant’s death, unless the police interfere, similar scenes are enacted in the Champ de Navets; and in these weird, commemorative rites the dead man’s little daughter, Sidonie, who was adopted by the camarades, plays a spectacular part.
A STREET RIOT
The anniversary of the death of Ravachol is celebrated by a pilgrimage of the faithful to the tomb of Diderot, who is regarded as a precursor of anarchism (Montbrison, where Ravachol is buried, being too far away for Parisians); and every anniversary of the deaths of those who have died for the cause and every funeral of a camarade is made a pretext for keeping alive the morbid cult. But the great saint day of the French anarchist calendar is the 11th of November, the anniversary of the anarchist executions at Chicago.