A few took up the refrain, but the general tone was negative. It was not so much a question of upholding anything as of throwing down that which was already up.
“Down with the Republic!” was the favourite cry. “Down with the President! Down with everything!”
And each man cried down his favourite enemy.
The Citizen Morot listened, and his contemptuous mouth was twisted with a delicate, subtle smile.
“Ah!” he muttered. “The voice of the people. The howling of the wolves. Go on, go on, my braves. Cry 'Long live the King,' and soon you will begin to believe that you mean it. They are barking now. Let them bark. Soon we shall teach them to bite, and then—then, who knows?”
His voice dropped almost to a whisper, and he stood there amidst the din and hubbub—dreaming. At last he raised his hand to his forehead—a prominent, rounded forehead, flat as the palm of one's hand from eyebrow to eyebrow, and curving at either side, sharply, back to deep-sunken temples.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, with a little laugh; and he drew from an inner pocket a delicately scented pocket-handkerchief, with which he wiped his brow. “If I get excited now, what will it be when they begin—to bite?”
All this while the orators were shouting their loudest, and the voices dispersed throughout the crowd raised at intervals their short, sharp cry of—
“Long live the King!”
And the police? There were only two agents attached to the immediate neighbourhood, and they were smoking cigars and drinking absinthe in two separate cellars, with the door locked on the outside. They were prisoners of war of the most resigned type. The room in which stood the Citizen Morot was dark, and wisely so. For the Parisian street politician can make very pretty practice of a lighted petroleum-lamp with an empty bottle or half a brick. The window was wide open, and the wooden shutters were hooked back.