Going through the Palais Royal, I heard some young men singing a familiar air; it was my own:
“Forget not our wounded companions, who stood
In the day of distress by our side;
While the moss of the valley grew red with their blood
They stirred not, but conquered and died.”[7]
Not used to such fame I, in great delight, asked the leader whether I might join in, and incontinently began a hot argument with him as to the time at which it should be taken. Of course I was not recognised.
As we sang, three of the National Guard handed round their shakos to collect money for the wounded and there was a welcome deluge of five franc pieces. The crowd increased and our breathing space became less and less; we should have ended in being smothered had not a kindly haberdasher asked us up to her first floor windows, that looked out upon the covered gallery, whence we could rain down our music upon the crowd below, as the Pope does his blessing from the balcony of St Peter’s.
First we gave them the Marseillaise. At the opening bar the noisy crowd stood motionless; at the end of the second verse the same silence; even so with the third. Irate at their apparent coldness, I roared out—
“Confound it all! Sing!”
And they sang.
Remember, those four or five thousand tightly packed people were—men, women and children—hot from the barricades, inflamed with lust for combat, and imagine how their
“Aux armes, citoyens!”
rolled out.