“I really expected the man to kill me,” he said, “and I got out this revolver which I always keep in the drawer.” And he pulled it out to show it to me. “A pretty affair,” he said, “if while you two were visiting in there a tragedy had gone on in here.”
I so shared the general nervousness that, more than once when I saw a man on the omnibus carrying a package, I feared a bomb and abruptly descended; yet along with all my nervousness I was always nosing around, hoping to see a bomb go off. It seemed to me that was my journalistic duty, but I never saw anything more than the ruins they had caused. I did see a pretty good revolution, one that had all the earmarks that I had been finding in my attempted study of Revolution. It was in July of 1893. This time it was youth in revolt, the youth of the Latin Quarter and the Beaux Arts. From start to finish the revolt went on practically under my windows.
The Annual Ball of the Beaux Arts in the winter of 1893 had scandalized Paris. As I remember, the exhibit which outraged was a lady who promenaded with no other covering than a mosquito net. The protest finally reached the Chamber of Deputies, where a member—Berenger—took it up in a serious way and proposed a restrictive law which angered the students. It was, they said, an interference with their right to amuse themselves. Immediately long and picturesque monômes—single lines of men, one hand on the shoulder of the man in front, the other grasping a hand of the one behind—threaded their way up and down the boulevards, particularly in the vicinity of the Luxembourg, chanting at the top of their voices, “Conspuez Berenger!” “Conspuez Loze [Chief of Police]!” “Down with the puritans!”
The demonstration began on a Saturday, and that night a great crowd centered in a café in my neighborhood. The place was packed inside and out with youths noisier and noisier as the hours went on. Finally the crowd became so unruly that a squadron of police charged them. There was a great hubbub and in the mêlée somebody hurled one of the heavy white match boxes which were used on all the tables in the Latin Quarter restaurants—a dangerous missile. It hit an innocent spectator who had come to see the fun—a young man of twenty-two or twenty-three from the other side of the river—and killed him. The students were wild with rage, and all that night and all next day they tore up and down the streets, pulling up trees, knocking over kiosks, breaking windows.
The shopkeepers of Paris, having the experience of centuries of revolutionary outbreaks behind them, knew when to retire; and before Monday night the heavy wooden shutters with which they protect their fronts were all up, their doors closed, and the Quarter was alive with soldiers and mounted police. The center of the disturbance that day, however, was not the Latin Quarter but the streets around the Chamber of Deputies, where a great band of angry students kept up a tumult. There were funny incidents. A big group of deputies came out to look over the demonstration, and on the instant the air rang with the jingling of hundreds of big copper sous pitched on the pavements to cries of “Panama, Panama.”
The Dahomans were pets of Paris in those days, a picturesque addition to the population. Handsomer creatures never were seen. It happened a carriageful, naked to the waist, attempted to pass through the crowd. At once the students set up the cry, “Berenger, Berenger, bring ’em a figleaf, bring ’em a figleaf.”
By Tuesday the Latin Quarter had begun to look sinister. The inevitable had happened.
A popular disturbance never remains long in the full control of those who start it. Advocates of all sorts of systems and causes join it, seize it, if one of them can produce a real leader. A students’ revolt can easily become an anarchist raid, with looting and arson on the side by professional lawbreakers, who always come out of their hiding places when anarchy breaks out. As the to-be-expected invasion of the Latin Quarter from without began, destruction increased. Omnibuses were seized and, at strategic points, piled up as barricades.
But the rioters never succeeded in making a stand. Steadily and quietly, night and day, platoons of mounted police moved up and down the boulevards and into the Quarter. I tried at first to go on my usual round, hoping to learn something of revolutionary technique, but after I had been caught in a crowd the cavalry was driving from the Place de la Sorbonne, had heard bullets whistling over my head, been forced to take refuge in the portal of the church, I was content to stay at home. However, there was excitement enough there.
Our street was narrow and steep. When the cavalry charged, it would fill up with the rioters. The movement was amazingly quiet—no shouting, no shots, the only noise the clatter of the horses’ feet as they drove the mass ahead.