The planning of this letter was most difficult, and took a great deal of time. Each separate group, having made out its draught, communicated it to the other groups. We numbered eleven groups, secretly bound together, each one of which had its partisans, and all our partisans wished to share in the drawing up of the letter. At last the final result, compiled from all the other draughts, received the approbation of the united groups, and the important letter was despatched. I addressed it to my friend Charles, in Paris, for him to take and deliver it from us to the Minister in person.
At that same moment the National Assembly cruelly decided that the workmen from seventeen to twenty-five years of age should be incorporated in different regiments, and also to send to the department of Sologne—a country desolated by fever, and whose climate was deadly—a certain number of workmen of the national workshops; and that the remainder should be distributed in the provinces, to build roads and do other work, which should be planned by the municipalities.
Thinking that our “national workman” would be sent to us some day, not only did we stop eating cakes, and economise in every possible way, but we begged and collected everything we could from our relatives under all sorts of pretexts. One girl had obtained a suit of clothes from one of her brothers, and had cleaned and mended it with care. No one was to be allowed even to suspect our plot, for we knew that we should be excommunicated by all our families if they should imagine that we were thinking of protecting one of the “monsters” of the national workshops.
So we had specified in our letter to Minister Trélat that our national workman was to present himself at the boarding-school of the Mlles. André of Chauny as a pensioner of Juliette Lambert!
My father had written to me that things were worse than had been reported; that the authorities occupied themselves no longer to find any sort of place for the workmen; that the National Assembly was odious, criminal; that it wished to dissolve the national workshops immediately, without caring what became of the hundred thousand men turned adrift. “There will be great misfortunes,” he added.
I went for a vacation the next day, a Sunday, to grandmother’s; and Blondeau talked politics before me without my saying a word, for I had determined, since my entrance at the boarding-school, not to speak of anything but commonplaces when I went to visit my grandparents.
Blondeau related what seemed incredible—that Trélat, the Minister of Public Instruction, had asked that some pity should be shown to the bandits of the national workshops, and had begged the National Assembly, with trembling voice, not to throw a hundred thousand men on the streets, and to allow him to discover some way of finding places for them; that he had proposed incorporation, sending them to the department of Sologne, road-building, and other work to be decided upon by the municipalities.
“Your news is a week old, Blondeau,” I could not help saying to him. “And you can add that the National Assembly laughed at Trélat’s tardy outbursts of feeling, and that it decided....”
I related the decision, and there was silence.
My grandfather, provoked, and scarcely able to control his anger, asked me: