Panic was on the increase during the following days. They said that the insurgents, driven out of Paris, were coming to sack the town; the National Guard went to bar the way against the plunderers. Grandmother, in spite of my reassuring words, was terrified. She hid at night, in a large hole which grandfather dug in our courtyard, her silver, her jewels, all the valuable things she possessed. Blondeau also buried his money-box in the hole, which they covered with earth and gravel.
My father, to whom grandmother had written, sent me a letter of congratulation at having left a school where they taught nothing but inane middle-class ideas.
XXXVI
ANOTHER VISIT AT CHIVRES
I THEN had a long vacation, which began the 1st of July and did not finish until the 1st of October.
I remained three months with my aunts at Chivres, to their great delight.
I took intense pleasure in the study of Latin, and made real progress in the reading and translating of the “bucolics.”
My aunts, however, sermonised me severely on the reason for my having been sent away from school. The National had inspired them with a holy horror of the plunderers, of those who had been “bought up by the foreigner,” and the twelve thousand men who had been killed in the June riots. The twenty thousand prisoners and exiles did not soften their hearts for a moment. My harangues interested them as ill-sustained paradoxes, but did not convince them in any way.
The citizen Louis Blanc, with his project of a conciliatory proclamation; the citizen Caussidière, with his extraordinary motion to have the Deputies go into the streets, to send them to the barricades and to the insurgents with a flag of truce, had exasperated them. They were merciless. The stories of the cruelties of the National Guards in the provinces, and of the Mobile Guard firing on the insurgent prisoners through the vent-holes of cellars, did not revolt them. It was necessary to kill as many as possible of those “mad dogs,” they said. And it was gentle Frenchwomen, faithful Liberals—or believing themselves such—who spoke thus! Marguerite knew nothing of the truth concerning it. To her the insurgents were savages, devils, etc.; and I could not make any feeling of clemency, any pity, enter into the minds or hearts of Marguerite or my aunts. They had all been too frightened.
While my father was alarmed, and cried out against the abomination of seeing men who for long years had defended liberty, who had called themselves its soldiers, condemn and persecute the people to whom they had made public and solemn promises to act for their good, and who had only asked them to keep those promises within the measure of possibility, my aunts spoke of Pascal Duprat, a Democratic-Republican, as a sublime man, who, while pretending to wish to save the Republic, had been the first man to demand a Dictatorship.