His ladder under his arm, a billsticker appeared to post up on a blank wall facing the baker's a proclamation by the Commune apportioning the rations of butcher's-meat. Passers-by halted to read the notice, still sticky with paste. A cabbage vendor going by, basket on back, began calling out in her loud cracked voice:
"They'm all gone, the purty oxen! best rake up the guts!"
Suddenly such an appalling stench of putrefaction rose from a sewer near by that several people were turned sick; a woman was taken ill and handed over in a fainting condition to a couple of National Guards, who carried her off to a pump a few yards away. All held their noses, and fell to growling and grumbling, exchanging conjectures each more ghastly and alarming than the last. What was it? a dead animal buried thereabouts, a dead fish, perhaps, put in for mischief's sake, or more likely a victim of the September massacres, some noble or priest, left to rot in a cellar.
"They buried them in cellars, eh?"
"They got rid of 'em anywhere and anyhow."
"It will be one of the Châtelet prisoners. On the 2nd I saw three hundred in a heap on the Port au Change."
The Parisians dreaded the vengeance of these aristocrats who were like to poison them with their dead bodies.
Évariste Gamelin joined the line; he was resolved to spare his old mother the fatigues of the long wait. His neighbour, the citoyen Brotteaux, went with him, calm and smiling, his Lucretius in the baggy pocket of his plum-coloured coat.
The good old fellow enjoyed the scene, calling it a bit of low life worthy the brush of a modern Teniers.
"These street-porters and goodwives," he declared, "are more amusing than the Greeks and Romans our painters are so fond of nowadays. For my part, I have always admired the Flemish style."