"The guard! the guard! Look out, comrades! here comes the guard!"
The cry ran along the line and through the ranks hushed by the wanton blow delivered unnecessarily upon a respected official. A company of the Garde Républicaine à pied had filed out across the Boulevard du Palais from behind the Préfecture; another company à cheval debouched into the quai from the other corner, and now rode slowly down towards the bridge.
"Bayonets in front and sabres on the flank!" said Jean to those around him. "It were wise to get out of this."
"Good advice, young man,—get out! It won't do, you see. You must cross singly, or as other citizens. Never mind your hot-headed young friend," added the old man, kindly, as he wiped the blood from his face. "We won't be hard on him. Only, you must go back at once!"
He talked to them as if they were little children. But they needed no further urging. The rear-guard had already turned tail at the sight of the troops and were in full retreat. Before the last man had cleared the bridge the only one who had been arrested was set at liberty, though he had richly earned six months in jail.
And thus terminated the harebrained attempt to march five hundred riotous men through the city directly in front of the Préfecture, where lay unlimited reserves, civil and military, under arms. The royalists had somewhat overstrained the complaisance of the authorities.
Acting at once on the hint of the police official, the crowd broke up into small groups. "À la Concorde! À la Concorde! Concorde!" they cried.
This revolutionary rendezvous was prearranged to mean Place du Carrousel, conditional on police interference. It was to deceive the authorities, the main object being to form a junction with the anticipated hordes from Montmartre and La Villette.
But a mob broken into scattered groups is no longer a mob, and being no longer a mob, there is no longer courage or cohesion of purpose. Instead of some four hundred students and about a hundred roughs, not more than fifty of the former responded at the foot of the Gambetta monument, while the latter class had gathered strength by the way.
This discrepancy, though painfully apparent to Jean Marot and his friends, in no wise dampened their ardor. Their chosen speakers lashed them into fresh furors of patriotism while they waited. The eloquent young man who quoted the words of Gambetta engraved on his monument wrung tears from his sympathetic auditors. These words of wisdom and patriotism had no pertinence whatever to the work in hand,—which was to break up a meeting organized by some distinguished philanthropists, scholars, and their friends in the interests of civil liberty and the perpetuity of human rights,—but everything serves as fuel to a flame well started.