Now he would fain have turned and escaped from the press, lest by any self-misconception his conscience should accuse him of lending his countenance to an iniquity; for he saw that such was planned and determined on, and for the first time there awoke in his heart some shadowy realisation of the true import of certain months-long signs and significances. He would have turned: he could not. He was wedged in, carried forward, rushed to the very outer core of the congested block of frowsy humanity that stormed and spat and shrieked under the high dull walls of the factory.
Here, perhaps, his national self-sufficiency was his somewhat arrogant counsellor.
“What has this man done,” he cried to those about him, “but exemplify that right to liberty of speech which you all demand?”
A dozen loathing glances were turned upon him. Savage oaths and ejaculations contested the opportuneness of so reasonable a sentiment. But it was not St Antoine’s way, now or at any time, to approve counsel for the defence. Only a cry, a sinister one then first beginning to be heard in the streets, broke out here and there.
“Down with the aristocrat!”
There was threat of a concentric movement upon the Englishman. He felt it as a moral pressure even before his immediate neighbours began to close inwards. One of the latter had a similar consciousness apparently. She was a coarse, fat poissarde, and the shallow groove that was her waist seemed moulded of the very habit of her truculent arms folded in front of her.
“Eh, my little radishes!” she cried in a voice like a corncrake’s. “Advance, you! Come, then—come! Here is a cat shall strip you of your breeches if you venture within her reach.”
Ned felt, and the crowd looked, astonishment over this unexpected championship. In the momentary proximate silence that befell, the shattering explosion of many of M. Reveillon’s windows bursting under volleys of stones was a significantly acute accent.
The fishwife nodded her head a great number of times.
“Hé! my little rats, you will not come? That is well for your whiskers, indeed. And do we not demand liberty of speech, as monsieur says; and are we not taking it to denounce one that would deprive us of the liberty to live? How! You would raise the devil against monsieur?” (she waxed furious in an instant)—“Monsieur l’Anglais, that all the hard winter has lived like a Jacobin friar, that he might give of his substance to the cold and the starving? Monsieur l’Anglais that lodges at the fruiterer’s, and without whose help Fanchon and her brat had been rotting now in St Pélagie! Oh, san’ Dieu! I know—I know! Pigs, beasts, ingrates! It will be well, in truth, for the first that comes within my reach!”